Postcard from New Delhi

The Commonwealth Games were meant to showcase the new greatness of a developing India. But they have become a source of deep anger instead

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Manpreet Romana AFP/Getty Images

Indian workers dismantle the collapsed footbridge at the Jawaharlal Stadium, the main venue for the forthcoming Commonwealth Games, in New Delhi on September 21, 2010. A footbridge under construction at the main stadium for the Delhi Commonwealth Games collapsed, injuring up to six labourers, an AFP reporter and police said. The structure, a steel arch supporting an approximately 50 metres (164 feet) footbridge, fell down just outside the main Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium which will host the opening ceremony and athletics when the showpiece event begins on October

If New Delhi is India's glittering Emerald City, Suresh Kalmadi must surely be its Wizard of Oz.

On Sept. 15, Kalmadi, a career politician, stood in the middle of Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in front of an $8.8 million helium-filled balloon 262 ft. (80 m) wide, commissioned for the opening ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games. The aerostat is his pride and joy, and he stood before it to try to reassure a group of journalists that everything was under control. The Commonwealth Games begin on Oct. 3 and will be the largest sporting event ever held in India. But many top athletes will not be attending, thanks to weeks of reports about construction delays, shoddy work, an outbreak of mosquito-borne diseases and an athletes' village deemed "uninhabitable" by visiting delegates.

Glossing over all that, Kalmadi, the chairman of the Games' organizing committee, confidently predicted that New Delhi would be "100% ready." At least that's what I think he said. It was difficult to hear him over the din of construction inside the stadium, and I was distracted by the workmen digging into the middle of the track right behind him. "There's no work going on, except a little bit of polishing," Kalmadi baldly said. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

This was only one of the astonishingly oblivious statements to come from functionaries in New Delhi as the Commonwealth Games approached. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Kalmadi and other officials have claimed that construction problems are "minor" (a footbridge near the main stadium collapsed on Sept. 21, injuring at least 23 people), that the dengue outbreak is a normal seasonal spike (there are thousands of cases--several times as many as in previous years) and, most alarming, that the city is secure. (Two Taiwanese were injured on Sept. 19 by gunmen targeting a tourist bus; the security dry run was repeatedly delayed.) Nevertheless, Kalmadi has promised that New Delhi's Commonwealth Games will be "better than the Beijing Olympics."

He might be right about that last point, but not in the way he intended. Before the 2008 Olympics, many wondered if the influx of visitors and worldwide attention would let a breath of fresh air into China's hermetically sealed politics. That didn't quite happen. The Beijing Olympics went off without significant protests; there were few signs that the Chinese people's pride in successfully hosting the Olympics implied higher hopes for their own government's performance.

Exactly the opposite is happening in India, where there's been an unusually frank display of public soul-searching about its failure to live up to its own hype. The biggest newspapers and television stations have been competing to top each other with scoops about cost overruns, safety violations and the use of child labor at Games sites. The front page of the Hindustan Times recently featured a photograph of three barefoot, barely clothed construction workers, two of them dangling a third upside down by his legs into a pit. The wry caption: "Aspiring superpower at work."

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