Makhan Singh

HOSHIARPUR, May 11: The year was 1964 and the event, the National Games at Calcutta. All eyes were on the man who set tracks afire in India and abroad, Milkha Singh. The crowd was cheering the Flying Sikh as he approached the finishing line of the 400 metres race. Then, the impossible happened.

Another Sikh runner touched the tape first. And that was Makhan Singh. More than three decades down the line, Arjuna Award winner Makhan Singh, 57, limps along on an artificial leg to his small stationery shop in Chabbewal village near Hoshiarpur. As memories race past him, the athlete whom Milkha Singh described as a ``sprinter with tremendous potential'', realises what life and the establishment has given him: a raw deal.

Sometimes the frames of the glorious days revisit him in moments of despair. The year before Makhan defeated Milkha Singh in 400 metres and also received the Arjuna Award, he had defeated Abdul Khalik, a Pakistani runner in 200 metres at Indo-Pak tournament in Lahore. ``Milkha had warned Khalik about me,'' he recollects. Milkha Singh told The Indian Express: ``Makhan Singh was the only Indian athlete I was afraid of.''

Life has been tough for Makhan Singh ever since his release from the Army in 1972. It is getting tougher. Left with the pension from the Army, five canals of agricultural land and family of wife and three sons to look after, Makhan Singh became a truck driver. Life chugged along through struggles till 1993 when a road accident turned it upside down. Makhan Singh lost a leg and was forced to set up a small shop.

That was just the beginning of a traumatic phase of life. In 1995, his son, a promising footballer, his only hope, committed suicide. ``Financial crisis compelled him to take the extreme step after I brought him to the village from Shivalik Public School in Mohali,'' says Singh, his voice cracking.

In fact, Makhan Singh's unfortunate patch began even when he was at the peak of his career. While many of his team mates landed good jobs in the government and in the public sector companies, Makhan Singh couldn't because he was in the Army.

``There was a time when big firms had offered me jobs and wanted me to leave the Army,'' he says. When he hit the headlines, Makhan Singh was offered the job of a District Sports Officer by the then Punjab Chief Minister, Partap Singh Kairon. ``Milkha was offered the post of Deputy Director in the sports department. But the Army authorities did not discharge me,'' he says.

Later, when he was released from the Army, Singh failed to find a job because of the lack of academic qualifications. He had studied only up to the seventh standard. Repeated visits to the Secretariat in Chandigarh yielded nothing. He remembered how he was roughed up once by the security personnel there, when he had gone to meet Mohinder Singh Kaypee, the sports minister in Beant Singh government.

In 1992, Suresh Kalmadi MP had sent a letter to the then Minister of Petroleum B Shankaranand recommending the allotment of a petrol pump to Makhan Singh. The Indian Oil Corporation authorities are yet to interview him for the allotment of a petrol pump at village Kamha.

Now, tired and disillusioned, Singh cycles to his shop from his home, two kilometers away at Bathula village. ``Today, I have nothing to show to the Press but an artificial leg,'' he says.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.