The estimable Vijay Mallya, the Force India chief whose 50th birthday shindig
on the beaches of Goa lasted for five days, would have struggled to concoct
a menu as exotic as the VIP banquet’s on Sunday, encompassing 100 separate
dishes.
What gives us pause, though, is that beneath the arc lights of the Buddh
International Circuit lurk a small army of impoverished villagers, none of
them enjoying quite such a spiffing time.
The spectacle of peasant labourers sweeping dust from the track has been
widely aired in our newspapers this week. ‘All systems go!’ is the message
pumped out by Bernie Ecclestone’s PR machine, as if the mobilisation for
this race is a matter of supreme national urgency in India.
‘Full speed ahead!’ The question no one seems bothered to venture is quite
what share these people have in the space-age circus that has just landed on
their doorsteps.
None at all, if the words of Meera, a native of the nearby settlement of
Salarpur, are any clue. “What is this Formula One?” she asks. “I learned
only recently that some of our land was acquired for it.” She is illiterate,
a mother-of-four, and one of her sons has suffered twice from malaria.
And yet her village, a place where calves rest upon untended rubbish heaps,
lies in distasteful proximity to a £300 million racetrack, itself fringed by
a 60-acre golf and spa resort. F1 is accentuating like no other sport the
dichotomy of the modern India.
On the one hand, a perception is peddled of this grand prix as a source of
public self-confidence, of restoring public faith in Indian efficiency with
an ‘on-time, on-budget’ showpiece just one year after Delhi’s chaotic
Commonwealth Games.
The success of Jaypee Sports International in having the Buddh complex ready
with no cost overruns ought, in theory, to galvanise investor confidence
that the private sector can pull off an event of global reach.
The reality is that the race represents one of the more grotesque examples of
sport’s skewed economic benefit.
One wonders at the wisdom of Ecclestone, Mallya and their ilk in arguing that
India can prosper from the visit of F1 when its malnutrition rates approach
those of Ethiopia, or when the cheapest £35 race-day tickets cost twice the
monthly wage of a local cleaner.
“In many ways it epitomises what is wrong with this country,” said Paranjoy
Guha Thakurta, a political commentator. “One section of India would like to
tell the rest of the world about how fast-growing we are. Just come here and
see the poverty on the ground and you get a reality check.”
Come and see the politics, too. Uttar Pradesh happens to be ruled by Mayawati
Jumari, the controversial 55-year-old governor who believes she can yet be
prime minister. Already there is disquiet as to why she has granted grand
prix officials exemption from an entertainment tax.
But this inconsistency would seem to be at one with her style of command,
described most pithily in a WikiLeaks cable: “Mayawati runs the state like a
fiefdom, but most voters take corruption in Uttar Pradesh politics as a
given.”
In one notorious incident last year, she ordered a stadium in the state
capital of Lucknow to be torn down to make room for statues glorifying her
party’s leaders.
And this is the territory where Ecclestone sees fit to bring his latest parade
of one-thousand-horsepowered bling. It is time, perhaps, for him to wake up
and smell the petrol.