It is part of the full, and unsavoury, reality of Indian sports that even as the nation celebrates Abhinav Bindra’s Olympic gold, one baffled and angry corner of it is trying to make sense of what happened to Monika Devi. The staggering injustice of this champion weightlifter from Manipur’s Nachou village being prevented from taking part in the Beijing Olympics truly baffles the imagination. To be made to swing between humiliation and hope as she was subjected to a dope test, told that she had tested positive, dropped from the Indian team, told again that the results were mistaken, and finally barred from participating in the Games because the mistake was cleared up a little too late, is to subject somebody to a misfortune that is surreal in its irreparability. Yet, there is nothing supernatural about such a fate. It is the result of a kind of human irregularity that does not deserve to be made to sound forgivable by being called an ‘error’. And forgiveness is far from the minds of most Manipuris. This is both understandable and unfortunate. A certain perception of injustice is part of Manipur’s everyday life, and it is not difficult for Monika Devi’s situation to look like yet another instance of that shared apprehension.

It is just as difficult to dissociate sports, especially the Olympics, from the politics of nationhood. This makes it inevitable that Manipur’s troubled relationship with the “idea of India” would colour its people’s perception of Monika Devi’s exclusion from the Olympics. Ordinary Manipuris see themselves as struggling with a double adversity: first, the sense of neglect with respect to the Centre, and second, the darkening shadow of militancy always threatening to paralyse normal life. Sports and culture happen to be the two spheres of activity that Manipuris value as somehow transcending these mundane conflicts, and it is here that Monika Devi’s treatment in the hands of India’s sports bureaucrats and politicians has hurt and infuriated most. It is an incident like this that makes unpleasantly evident how her rise from a poor farming family to a Commonwealth gold is tied up with her relationship with the State, with her being ‘taken up’ by the Sports Authority of India, which then begins to control her interface with the global scene. Her sense of the cruellest betrayal by the same authorities will have to be taken with complete seriousness, together with the outrage of those for whom her achievements matter profoundly.