What If They Threw an Olympic Torch Rally and No One Came?

Crowds gather in New Delhi, but city closes Olympic relay for fear of protests.

ByABC News
April 30, 2008, 7:39 AM

NEW DELHI, April 17, 2008 — -- The world's best-known sporting event was missing something when its symbol was run through India's capital city this afternoon: a single fan.

It's not that the Olympics doesn't garner great interest in India, which has the world's second-largest population. It's just that the organizers of today's less-than-two-mile torch relay chose lockdown over participation, chose security so stringent that not a single casual spectator was allowed to watch the torch's triumphant run down the city's most iconic boulevard.

The torch successfully completed what could have been its most volatile visit yet a relay through the capital of India, which hosts the largest Tibetan population in the world outside of Tibet itself.

Earlier this month, in London and in Paris, Tibetan sympathizers tried to grab and extinguish the torch. And in India, the 100,000 Tibetans living here in exile have repeatedly organized protests condemning what they call Chinese atrocities in Tibet.

But this afternoon in central Delhi, there was not a Tibetan flag to be seen.

"We're not afraid of movements," the association's president, Suresh Kalmadi, told reporters in New Delhi ahead of the relay. "But we must be safe. They can have their movements somewhere else."

That somewhere else was anywhere but Rajpath, the equivalent of Washington's Mall, which is flanked on one side by Parliament and on the other side by India Gate, a war memorial and the city's best-known monument.

The government ensured the torch's safety by first limiting the route to that single, straight street after originally announcing it would snake through the city. And then it created an unprecedented security bubble.

At least 13,000 police and an undisclosed number of paramilitary officers lined the road, in addition to two Chinese security officers who jogged alongside the torch in trademark blue jumpsuits.

Streets usually packed with cars that surround Rajpath were cordoned off for hours.

That security meant residents were barred from seeing the torch relay unless they were watching it on their televisions. The organizers never publicly announced the official time of the relay, and journalists were told of the time (off by 90 minutes) only a few hours before the rally began.