The enduring charm of the Bangalore Derby

 Glanders, Panic and the Price of Paralysis

 

By Sharan Kumar

 

Horse racing across parts of Southern India is at a standstill. Bangalore, Mysore and Hyderabad are shut and, by official design, will remain so for at least three months, pending completion of mandated testing cycles for glanders. What must be stated upfront, however, is that Indian racing as a whole has not shut down. Racing continues without disruption at Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi, with the only major restriction being the ban on movement of horses from affected southern centres.

 

That distinction matters.

 

The immediate question troubling owners, trainers, jockeys and stable staff in the south is not whether caution is required, but whether racing must really wait until May, when the Bangalore summer season is scheduled to begin, or whether it can resume earlier under controlled conditions.

 

Hyderabad, because of its scorching summer, cannot realistically start early. Mysore traditionally begins its summer season only towards the fag end of May. Time, therefore, is already against the southern circuit. The unease is sharpened by a more uncomfortable question: what if a single horse tests positive at the end of the third testing cycle? Does the clock reset yet again? Does racing remain shut indefinitely? Is there any global precedent where racing resumed in a controlled environment even when absolute disease-free status had not been declared?

 

These are not academic queries. They are questions of survival. And yet, racing officials appear to have no clear answers, largely because there has been little visible effort to examine how other racing jurisdictions coped with glanders when it affected their racing populations.

 

To be clear, the entire south has not been identified as glanders-affected. The disease has been detected only within specific racecourse stable populations, following which racing at those racecourses has been shut down. Glanders, in the present context, is racecourse-restricted, not zone-restricted. The rest of the country continues to race, underlining that this is a localised containment issue, not a national crisis.

 

Southern Indian racing has been brought to a halt not by a widespread epidemic, but by a handful of positive cases within racecourse environments, and by a response that has confused containment with capitulation. Racing centres now sit in enforced silence, as if the only acceptable policy response is to shut down operations and wait for theoretical perfection.

History suggests otherwise.

 

This is not the first time racing jurisdictions have confronted glanders. Brazil, frequently cited but rarely examined closely, faced serious glanders outbreaks in the late 1990s and early 2000s affecting Thoroughbreds, polo ponies and working equids. Brazil did not shut down racing nationwide. Authorities adopted stable-level and racecourse-level containment, enforced repeat testing, restricted movement and resumed racing in controlled environments within six to nine months. In several pockets, racing returned much earlier once successive testing cycles were clean. International confidence and export permissions took longer to restore, but domestic racing was never frozen waiting for national eradication.

 

Post-war Germany followed the same logic. Test, cull, isolate and resume. Racing restarted locally within months once affected stables were addressed, even as eradication efforts continued elsewhere. Japan treated racecourses as bio secure islands, allowing racing to function once racing populations tested clean, regardless of sporadic cases outside racing. More recently, Turkey managed isolated glanders cases in non-racing equids while permitting racing to continue under strict surveillance.

 

The global pattern is unmistakable. Racing resumes before absolute eradication. What matters is not geographic purity, but racecourse-level biosecurity, segregation and surveillance.

 

Crucially, international precedent also shows that racing need not wait for an arbitrary three-month blackout to expire. Where two successive testing cycles have returned negative results, affected horses have been removed and movement controls enforced, racing has resumed within eight to ten weeks of the last positive case. Delays beyond that are rarely medical; they are administrative.

 

Southern India, however, has chosen a far more rigid path. Racing at each affected racecourse has been shut down entirely, despite the disease not being identified beyond those campuses. The shutdown reflects not just caution, but the legacy of weak internal firewalls, where racing stables were insufficiently insulated from other equine traffic. That failure has now produced consequences that threaten to outlast the disease itself.

 

The graver implications extend far beyond missed fixtures. Owners face mounting financial stress as training bills accumulate without racing income. Breeders lose crucial seasonal windows. Stable staff drift away. Horses lose fitness, value and continuity. Confidence, once fractured, is harder to restore than any biosecurity protocol. Prolonged shutdowns risk turning a health issue into a structural crisis for southern Indian racing, even as the rest of the country continues to race.

 

So, can racing realistically resume in four to five months, or even earlier than May, even if a stray positive emerges within a racecourse population? International precedent suggests yes, provided the response shifts from administrative paralysis to clinical management.

 

That would require:

 

• Treating each racecourse as a discrete biosecurity unit, not holding all centres hostage to the slowest clearance
• Enforcing repeat testing and continuous surveillance, rather than endlessly resetting the clock
• Absolute segregation of racing stables from non-racing equine populations
• Clear, published protocols that reassure stakeholders instead of unsettling them

 

Waiting for theoretical perfection before resuming racing is neither international best practice nor epidemiologically essential. It is caution stretched into inertia.

 

Glanders is a serious disease. No one disputes that. But history is unequivocal. It is managed, not feared into submission. Racing survives not by indefinite shutdowns, but by building internal firewalls, enforcing discipline and moving forward with informed confidence.

 

The lesson from Brazil, Germany and Japan remains blunt and unavoidable:
you don’t burn down the racecourse to isolate a stable.