FIH plays strong disaffiliation card

M.S. Unnikrishnan

Even as hockey stuttered between lots of misses and a few hits, the Indian Hockey Confederation added to the chaos, demanding holding up of the funds due to the FIH.

Th

e varied struggles between Hockey India (HI) and the Indian Hockey Federation (FIH); the Sports Ministry versus the Indian Olympic Association (IOA); IHF vs. IOA; players vs. administrators and the International Hockey Federation (FIH) versus all the stakeholders of Indian hockey, has driven the game into a mire, though India’s title triumph in the inaugural Asian Champions Trophy has provided a whiff of fresh air.

If the FIH decision to move out the Champions Trophy from Delhi to Auckland, which has robbed India of a place in the prestigious event, was not jolting enough, FIH president Leandro Negre, who was in Delhi on Tuesday to have parleys with the ministry, IOA and hockey officials, gave no assurance of backtracking from its threat of disaffiliating Hockey India and pulling out the Olympic qualifiers from Delhi.

Though he set no time frame for HI and IHF to form a single body, as is prevalent in other countries and to be tune with the Olympic Charter and IHF guidelines, he expected the merger to take place sooner than later. Negre emphasised that the FIH was committed to the development of Indian hockey but would not tolerate a multiplicity of authority, though he conceded that HI was a duly elected body and FIH was aware of that.

“But we cannot recognise more than one unit for running the game,” he had stated. He was also aware of the pending court cases with regard to the legal standing of the IHF and HI, and the IOA’s known opposition to the Sports Ministry-brokered truce between IHF and HI as it recognised only Hockey India.

IOA acting president Vijay Kumar Malhotra, after his meeting with Negre, had blamed the Sports Ministry for losing the Champions Trophy as it was a letter from the Ministry to the FIH in July, informing the world body about the unity forged between the two warring bodies, but maintaining their individual status nevertheless, which forced a re-think by the FIH about allowing Delhi to host the Champions Trophy.

The FIH then issued a warning that the event will be shifted out of Delhi if IHF and HI did not merge and carried out the threat on the day Negre landed in Delhi, when there was no sign of a merger.

Now, the Indian Hockey Confederation (IHC), which supposedly came into being with the merger of IHF and the Indian Women’s Hockey Federation (IWHF) for the consumption of the FIH (though the international body did not accept this so-called merger and disaffiliated IHF) has added fuel to the controversy by asking the Reserve Bank of India to stop payment of $500,000 owed to the FIH for hosting the Hero Honda World Cup in Delhi last year.

The IHC contention was that it had signed the original Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the World Cup to be held as a joint venture with the FIH on November 6, 2007 before it was organised by the Hero Honda World Cup Society, in which both the FIH and the HI had stakes. IHC argued that releasing the withheld money to FIH would amount to violation of the Foreign Exchange Act of 1973.

The FIH is already peeved that the IHF, in association with Nimbus, will be organizing the FIH unsanctioned World Series Hockey (WSH) on a franchise-based format, which will send the cash registers clicking and give a hefty pay packet to the players.

The WSH will be clashing with the Champions Trophy and that was reason for the IHF to be upset. Negre’s visit to Delhi was to warn the stake-holders in India to fall in line or face severe consequences, which will include banning India from all the FIH-recognised events, including the Olympic Games, Asian Games, Champions Trophy, World Cup and the Commonwealth Games.

This is reason enough for hockey community to panic, unless they thrash out a final solution in the next few months, nay weeks, to bring Indian hockey back into centre-stage.