Given that some of the world’s best-known news-purveyors had already told their subscribers why India’s wrestling girls had achieved nothing in their fight against an allegedly sexually predatory national federation chief, it was not surprising that the British Broadcasting Corporation too pitched in. The gratuitous violence inflicted on wrestlers by Delhi police was cruel, ugly and, punctuated with sound effects that soothed nobody’s nerves. The fracas allowed the world a glimpse of an India its rulers might not have been keen on projecting. Yet, there it was.
That the whole shebang was followed by the uninhibited verbal expression of a retired Indian Police Service officer’s trigger-happy disposition towards the wrestlers, the scared lot’s flight to rural retreats in nearby states and the possibility of them dropping their medals into the Ganga at Hardwar showed how quintessentially Indian the sordid story was, complete with the rulers’ alleged compulsion to shield the man in the eye of the storm, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.
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It was a rediscovery of India. Singh was the king, waving a friendly hand at the camera and triumphantly smirking inside the new law-makers’ citadel even as independent YouTubers calculated the number of cases registered against him over the years when he won elections and, according to the wrestlers, pretty much got his own way in the federation. It, in that sense, has been a comprehensive disaster, one that leaves the country in nowhere-to-hide ignominy. Word is that he is stubbornly resistant as yielding on this will almost certainly end his political career and, a lame duck now, he will pull out of the sport only when his own candidates ` some of them related to him ~ have been placed in key positions in the Wrestling Federation of India.
There’s a deadline for the elections to be completed. If the wrestlers choose to further intensify their protest by then, of course without attracting the attention of the police, who have now barred them the easy visibility of Jantar Mantar, there is also the possibility of the WFI polls producing results that suit Singh. Meanwhile, Naresh Tikait, who says the wrestlers’ medals shouldn’t have been dropped into the river, and Anurag Thakur, who wants us to believe the Centre brims over with the milk of human kindness, stick around to provide entertainment for the argumentative Indian. But who do the publicly humiliated girls belong to? If it is India, it didn’t seem so while they were being contemptuously hit with lathis that sent them reeling, eventually to fall on the road.
When they were hauled away, those medals would have been so much sawdust to them. And it will be decades before a coach uses patriotism to fire up an Indian in an international competition as memories of the Sunday showdown can’t fade fast. The mystery of why more is not being done to resolve the issue remains.
