Indian wrestlers' long protest exposes Modi's selective callousness; qualifies his claims to nationalism, male pride, and women's empowerment
by Dr. Piyush Mathur
On January 18, thirty Indian wrestlers (including celebrated Olympic medalists Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik, Anshu Malik, and Bajrang Punia) shocked India and the sporting world generally when they accused Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh—the president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) and a Member of Parliament from the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)—of having sexually harassed its female wrestlers over the course of many years. While Singh was their main target, these wrestlers would also come to point fingers at hitherto unnamed WFI coaches of a disturbing pattern of behaviour toward female wrestlers. All in all, the picture that these protesters drew of the WFI was that of an organization that, under Singh, had cultivated a culture of sexual abuse targeting female wrestlers as well as bureaucratic incompetence, financial corruption, and administrative coercion.
In fact, these wrestlers had been so frustrated for having failed to gain any traction inside the WFI that they had been driven to stage a sit-in—soon to be joined in by around 170 other wrestlers and members of the public—at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi on that day. But as if to rub salt into their wound, Singh, who had already refused to resign, would choose to play ‘Chief Guest’ on January 21 at the Senior Open National Ranking Tournament in Gonda, Uttar Pradesh (a BJP-ruled state). At that function, the regional bureaucracy was in full force, feting him.
On January 20, though, the protesters had written a letter to P. T. Usha, yesteryear’s sports superstar and the president of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), to set up a committee to investigate their allegations against the WFI; in response to this letter, the IOA would create, on the same day, a 7-member ‘Prevention of Sexual Harassment Committee’, to be headed by the larger-than-life Olympic medalist Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom. While the IOA was hardly flawless in how it went about setting up this committee (one of its members, the archer Dola Banerjee, claims to have come to learn of her inclusion in the committee via media reports), its step put pressure on the government to do something about the protest. Ergo, the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports (YAS)—headed by Anurag Thakur (another BJP MP)—declared later that day the establishment of its own Oversight Committee (OC) to probe the wrestlers’ allegations and make relevant recommendations to the ministry based upon its findings.
Through the 4-week duration of its inquiry, the OC was also handed the charge of the WFI’s daily operations—given that Singh had been suspended from the latter’s presidency. Call it Thakur’s willful sloppiness (intended to give a short shrift to the protest) or a crude attempt on his part to co-opt the IOA’s initiative, the OC was also made to retain Kom as its chair—while also retaining another member, Yogeshwar Dutt, of the IOA’s committee. The protesters of course saw right through Thakur’s move and chose not to present themselves at the IOA’s hearings, rendering that committee all but meaningless.
While the wrestlers’ allegations and their need to make a protest in their regard were depressing enough for the general citizenry, how the top sporting authorities and the powers above them had begun to handle them, right from this point on, was only aggravating the whole scene. What would unravel thereafter would be an epic tale of classic Indian-style trivialization of a serious matter via ad hoc bureaucratic tactics and tardy police work. Leave aside its specifics, this type of a situation confronts ordinary Indian citizens whenever they have to seek justice—a quest that is ultimately always serious to the person seeking it. However, inside the history of independent India, there just seems to be something unprecedented about this specific tale (whose last chapter is as yet a long way off): It would have had no chance of seeing much of an unfolding if not for the glaring political indifference that India’s prime minister has strategically shown and continues to show toward these protesters—whose core constituents are a bunch of national and even international superstars—and the issues they have raised.
Somebody had been overseeing the Oversight Committee
To come back to the OC, while one might wonder why the accusers would boycott the IOA committee in its favour when their grievance was with the core governmental structure (whose apparently autonomous extension OC was—unlike the IOA and its committee), their move would not have surprised India’s citizens, who tend to sense where actual power lies in what instance (and through what channel reform could be pushed and a modicum of accountability could be fixed on a given individual). What the protesters highlighted, though, was the redundancy of having two separate committees (on what they believed was the same issue) when they were both to be headed up by the same person; moreover, they believed that Dutt had already been partial toward the WFI. Underneath all this would have been the protesters’ perception—based upon their experience—that formal institutional demarcations in India fall by the wayside when individual actors cutting across them have overlapping interests, and when the rot had been present from the top downward for a while anyway. Subsequent events also seem to suggest that the protest leaders might have been less confident of P. T. Usha’s attitude toward their quest as compared to Kom's—not that they ended up too pleased with the latter once the inquiry began.
Now, inasmuch as Thakur displayed his usual lack of originality (but just enough political cunning, percolating to him from up on high) in how he set up the OC, he would have hoped that giving its headship to Kom—the best-known female pugilist of India—would serve to flatten the shockwaves that the protesters had sent across India and beyond. Indeed, this choice did seem reassuring enough for the public, and the protesters had also seemed to accept it—even though they were annoyed by the fact that Singh had not been forced to resign. Additionally, protest leaders claimed that Thakur had violated his assurance to them that they would be consulted on finalizing the list of members for the OC; on January 24, these leaders posted their regret on Thakur’s failure to keep his promise regarding the OC via tweets and retweets in Hindi, which were copied to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and Thakur.
The wrestlers’ grievance was sought to be addressed by Thakur by adding a 6th member to the OC: Babita Kumari Phogat, another awarded wrestler belonging to the famous Phogat family of female wrestlers (and a cousin of Vinesh, a key protester). This choice, though, was also a midpoint between the protesters and the government in that Babita had joined the BJP in 2019 (a fact that would ultimately escalate into a total blow up between her and a key protest leader, Malik, on June 19). Nevertheless, the wrestlers, hoping that the OC would open up their path to justice, had folded up their protest on January 21—and had specifically pulled back from attempting to file ‘the multiple FIRs against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh which they had warned of earlier’; Punia had even thanked the government in a tweet in Hindi announcing the end of the protest. However, as we all know now, the wrestlers had been soundly played by the government.
Inasmuch as Thakur (no doubt in close communication with the BJP top brass) stumbled a few times too many in favour of Singh during those early days of the protest, he unwittingly illustrated to the national citizenry the validity of a key grievance that the wrestlers previously had only against the WFI: That they were not being heeded. In other words, Thakur simply stretched out on to the national spectrum what was otherwise an organization-specific grievance, as far as the wrestlers were concerned. And as for the OC that he had set up, it would anyway fail to impress anybody: Not only that it could not complete its report within the deadline of four weeks, but also that when it did complete it—on April 5—at the end of a two-week extension that it had been granted, it did not make the document public because it had not been empowered to do so by Thakur. India’s media reported the presumed contents of the OC’s report in late April partly based upon their access to a letter that the ministry had sent to the IOA mentioning them (qua generalities) and also declaring the end of the OC, citing the conclusion of its inquiry.
Thakur let the OC—specifically Kom—take the fall for not making its report public. Predictably, Kom received criticism for failing to make the report public or discussing its findings directly. Now, Kom is not any more innocent than all other human adults on Planet Earth, but it is very important to understand that barring cricketers (to some extent), competitive sportspersons in India depend a lot on governmental support during their formative years—and until they could make it big on the national or international stage (whereafter government awards weigh them down anyway). Private sponsors are still very few, and they frequently have to work in cooperation with governmental institutions, which control most of the sports infrastructure. This system—whose overwhelming paternalism can only survive inside the generally paternalistic culture of much of South Asia—instils, from early on, a great deal of conformity, discipline, obedience, and statist nationalism in an Indian sportsperson—and Kom, not unlike others (including P. T. Usha, who has also been criticized by the protesters), is a product of that ethos. Moreover, we cannot ignore the fact that both Kom and P. T. Usha—while not career politicians themselves—were supported by the BJP as nominees to India’s Upper House.
Given that type of a grooming as a sportsperson and beyond, Kom would have been expected to do as the ministry would have told her to do—in regard to the secrecy of the OC’s report anyway, if not with the actual investigation; contrariwise, that would have been the professional thing to do for her, given the ministry’s instructions to her. As to how the investigation itself was conducted, the accusers have since made it be known, anonymously to Indian Express, that they did not consider it to be either a professional or a sensitive hearing: While some of their complaints would seem one-sided from an investigative viewpoint, there are many others that should easily persuade fellow Indians with similar systemic experiences that a rushed, insensitive hearing had been conducted by the OC—some of whose members discouraged the accusers, in many different ways, from moving any further in their quest for justice.
The protest resumes
As April wore on and the wrestlers saw no sign of any governmental action addressing their personal complaints—but only an attempt at preparing for the next elections for the WFI—they resumed their protest by coming back to the same site on the 23rd of that month. Between January 27 and April 23, some of these top wrestlers would miss out on training sessions and trials, and skip a couple of major sporting events in and outside India; Vinesh would attack an unnamed member of the OC for leaking sensitive information about the ongoing inquiry; the United World Wrestling would move the 2023 Asian Wrestling Championships from New Delhi to Astana, Kazakhstan, citing the OC's inquiry; and Singh would preside over another national sporting event—the U-17 National Cadet Championships—also held in Gonda, Uttar Pradesh, while officially under suspension from his WFI presidency. Last but not least, the protesters would lodge a complaint on April 21 with the callous police of Connaught Place, Delhi against Singh—except that the police won’t register a First Information Report (FIR) on the basis of that complaint.
In India, an FIR obligates the police to investigate a complaint and file a report on its investigation in a court of law. Given the police’s attitude inside the police station and its unwillingness to register an FIR—aside from the evolving history of their protest itself—the protesters were now in good grasp of how much their Prime Minister, Home Minister, and the YAS Minister (pun intended) cared for their repeated calls for intervention. Delhi Police, which is controlled by the BJP-appointed Delhi’s Governor, were simply licking the side of the bread that they knew was buttered.
Ergo, the very day they resumed their protest, the wrestlers also filed a complaint against Delhi Police with the Delhi Commission of Women (DCW), headed by a woman—a feminist activist—who belongs to a party that opposes the BJP. The DCW had been backing the protesters from the beginning; this time, on that day itself, it sent a notice to Delhi Police, asking it to register the protesters’ FIR. This notice was followed, three days later, by a formal recommendation (also tweeted) that the DCW chief would make to Delhi Police to file an FIR against the police officer who had refused to file the wrestlers’ FIR!
As India’s Supreme Court intervenes, the police acts—but not without shaking up the public
Ultimately, it would take the intervention of India’s Supreme Court on April 26—based upon a plea filed by the protesters—to prompt the police into registering two FIRs against Singh on April 28. Ahead of approaching the court, the protesters gave statements to the reporters and social media that this was now their only hope—implying that the administration and the political leadership, all the way to the top, had failed them. Nevertheless, it won’t be until June 15 that the police would file a chargesheet against Singh while also requesting the cancellation of one of the two FIRs, based upon its investigation (a step that has left some discontent among the protesters).
Between the protest’s resumption and the chargesheet, though, India's civil society would witness some of the crudest and most indigestible moves made on the part of the authorities regarding the protesters—who, in turn, would gain in sympathy and attention from a widening social spectrum (while also getting enmeshed into the opposition leaders’ rivalries with the BJP). Consider this: If the wrestlers’ first round of their 24-7 sit-in was during the shivering winter of Delhi, their second round had started well inside the insufferable heat of the same city. Indian citizens had been appalled, as it is, to see on the TV and the Internet these otherwise non-political young stars camping out like that, begging for justice on a sensitive issue; during this second sit-in, though, they would see them getting into a scuffle with the police—and they would also see the DCW chief getting hauled away, upon her arrival at the site, by the coldly respectful, Hindi-speaking female police personnel even as she shouts at them, rather self-righteously, in English.
On May 8, the protest site would be visited by the leaders of a large coalition of Northern traditional social organizations—including farmers and ruralites—who would serve up an ultimatum to the government that a national stir would be launched if Singh were not arrested by May 21. This was roughly the same organizational coalition that had forced, via almost a year-and-half long bloody protest (2020-2021), a highly resistant, aloof Modi to repeal three farm laws in 2021: a protest that had also contributed to the BJP’s total loss in the Punjab assembly elections in March 2022. After the intervention of the Supreme Court, it was the intervention of this coalition that has come to constitute the critical next step tipping the balance in favour of the protesters—prompting calls further down the line even from the BJP for taking some kind of action on their demands.
With the media storm rising and an increasingly wider base of Indian citizenry focusing on the wrestlers’ protest, the pressure had been building on Delhi Police, which told a court on May 12 that a Special Investigation Team had been formed to investigate the wrestlers’ allegations; meanwhile, the National Human Rights Commission also issued notices to several sports authorities—including the WFI—on why they had not complied with the rules of the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act. But then, on May 28, when Modi was going to inaugurate a new, unnecessary building—built at a great expense and against a ton of opposition—for India's parliament, the protesting wrestlers began a march toward it. The wrestlers had hoped to hold a 'Mahila Samman Mahapanchayat' ('Grand Gathering for Women's Honour') outside this new building, Modi’s high-profile vanity project.
Well before the marchers could reach their intended site, though, they were arrested by the police—coincidentally in front of Singh's residence—which was a gut-churning scene overall; and they had FIRs lodged against them later that day itself! The disturbing images and video footages of the wrestlers' arrests utterly darkened the mood of the public—even as Modi did his best that day to be the hero of his own show regarding the new parliamentary building’s inaugural. Modi’s considerable fanbase aside, there was hardly anybody in India who could savour an ostentatious inaugural that had the enormous wound of the wrestlers’ coercive arrest smack in its middle.
A mute spectator for a reason
All in all, right from the beginning of the protest, the BJP’s ruling machinery—with Thakur as its public face—dealt with this high-profile situation at best inaptly and confusingly; at worst, it has remained clear-eyed, to the point of being absolutely shameless, about protecting its own from the very beginning. Under these circumstances, it is hardly lost on the public that such a situation would not have festered without the blessings of Modi, who, as usual, has stuck too close to his creed of protecting loyal ideologues—no matter the list of their stinking deeds. For, to be sure, Singh—a six-term MP—has quite a rap sheet, except that all of those prior details have appeared to make him more of a hero inside the length and breadth of the Hindutwa Right.
Even if the BJP had wished to uphold the fine principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in regard to its elected representative—Singh—it could have done so simply by asking him to resign from his WFI presidency while letting the wrestlers prove their case in a court of law via the services of either a public prosecutor or a private lawyer or both. There is no doubt that Singh would have resigned if he had sensed that Modi was not on his side politically. Just in case Singh were to be proven innocent of the crimes he has been accused of by the wrestlers, he could have been rehabilitated to some political post by the BJP.
Modi, by far the most garrulous Indian Prime Minister in history, had not been helping Singh vocally—but by remaining silent when much of his country’s citizenry had been seeing in the media and talking about the protesting wrestlers’ struggle. That he has been using this silent treatment as a tactic to protect a member of his party and government is far from lost on the wrestlers, who have pointedly highlighted this in similar yet separate comments. Consider, for example, Vinesh’s words here, on Modi, from a press interaction dated to April 25:
He does his program 'Mann ki Baat' but has he even for a minute given a thought to our mann ki baat, how much dilemma does he think we face that daughters of the nation are sitting on the roads and are on the cusp of quitting wrestling by standing against a big criminal?
In a nutshell, Modi—who has consistently presented himself as an über, style-obsessed, powerful male who protects and promotes females, and an über nationalist with overarching authority, mobility, and universal appeal that stretches out to the youth—has steadfastly let that composite image get compromised by keeping totally quiet about these young female national heroes’ plight. While he sure has his political calculations regarding himself in place behind his stance, it would be far fetched to assume that the wrestlers’ protest and his sidelining thereof won’t bring some damage to the prospects of his party—at least in the areas that the accusers call their home.
That this sad saga should unfold under the long shadow of #MeToo—and when Modi’s geopolitical stars are shining so bright that the domestic media could barely keep up with the domestic bushfires—might just be the icing on this rotten cake.
Dr. Piyush Mathur is a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship, Montclair, New Jersey. If you wish to contact him, send us a message here.
Background material
ABV Live (January 21, 2023) ‘इस्तीफा देना दूर की बात, यूपी में कुश्ती टूर्नामेंट के चीफ गेस्ट बने बृजभूषण, स्वागत में बिछे अधिकारी’ (Accessed on May 21, 2023 via this URL: https://www.abplive.com/news/india/wfi-president-brij-bhushan-singh-chief-guest-at-wrestling-event-gonda-up-day-after-being-asked-to-step-aside-as-wfi-chief-2313762)
ABP NewsBureau (June 16, 2023) ‘Pressure On Family’: Sakshi Malik On POCSO Case Against Brij Bhushan, Wrestlers To Decide Next Step’ (Accessed from the following URL on June 20, 2023: https://news.abplive.com/news/india/wrestlers-protest-sakshi-malik-on-pocso-case-against-brij-bhushan-sharan-singh-wrestlers-to-decide-on-future-course-chargesheet-1609436)
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