WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLANDERS OUTBREAK CATASTROPHE IN INDIAN RACING?

 

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GLANDERS OUTBREAK CATASTROPHE IN INDIAN RACING?

Let’s stop sugar-coating it — the Indian turf authorities themselves have engineered this disaster. Through negligence, indifference, and a stunning lack of professional accountability, they have dragged the sport into a biosecurity crisis of their own making.

The Glanders outbreak didn’t “happen.”

It was allowed to happen.

Allowed by clubs that refused to treat a fatal, protocol-bound disease with the gravity it demanded. Hyderabad has already been decimated, and the remaining centres are shamelessly lining up to repeat the same mistakes, sleepwalking into chaos.

This is what happens when race clubs operate with prehistoric administrative structures, outdated veterinary oversight, zero crisis-readiness, and committees more interested in politics than protection. The warning signs were blinking for months — yet the response was textbook incompetence: delay, denial, and total dereliction of duty.

Indian racing today suffers not because of the disease,

but because of the disease of mismanagement.

Where were the emergency action plans?

Where was the strict biosecurity grid?

Where was the centralised command to enforce testing, quarantine, movement restrictions, and scientific protocols?

NOWHERE.

Because the people entrusted with safeguarding the sport treated this crisis like an inconvenient paperwork issue instead of a potentially season-ending emergency.

This isn’t a failure —

it is a collapse of governance.

Indian racing needs professional, no-nonsense officers with decades of on-ground racing and veterinary experience — not figureheads who vanish when the sport needs leadership. Protocols exist to be enforced with military precision, not interpreted casually by committees with no skin in the game.

It is outrageous that clubs need to be “reminded” to stay prepared for outbreaks.

Preparedness is their first responsibility.

Competence is their minimum requirement.

Yet we are staring at a system so porous and complacent that it wil

lingly walked into a biological minefield.

Make no mistake:

this Glanders crisis is not an accident — it is the direct consequence of racing authorities failing Indian racing at every level.

If the sport wants to survive, nothing short of a total administrative overhaul will suffice.