India has spent the best part of 2023 shielding an alleged sexual predator who can get away with anything he wants. And his victory as the year rolls past its mid-point is said to be spectacularly comprehensive. One of India’s wrestling girls who had been among the courageous ones to complain about Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of the Wrestling Federation of India, recently told an American paper that their protest was “on pause”, career priorities having to be thought of in the year of the Asian Games, which would merge in the run-up to next year’s Olympics.

Legal protests are being considered when the wrestlers could be seeking to balance things out with performances on the mat. You don’t want to aim a barb at them though many others did during the Jantar Mantar protests, suspecting a weakening commitment to the cause, but honesty demands we concede the battle had fizzled out earlier, each passing day revealing yet another aspect of the impossible magnitude of the struggle, as the state, using all its power, put in a tackle which was mind-crunching.

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Official India saw only a few girls getting too big for their shoes and snuffed them out with a series of snubs – no water, no lights where they were camping – climaxing it all with the crackdown which coincided, ironically, with the inauguration of India’s new parliamentary building. Pictures of the girls forced down, being dragged across the road and detained flashed in every living room, probably leaving every Indian in shocked disbelief.

India, its wide array of people subscribing to a staggering variety of schools of thought, opinion and philosophy, essentially did not have its people standing by the wrestling girls of New Delhi, who were protesting against sexual exploitation by a national federation chief with a close and mutually beneficial relationship with the party in power at the Centre. Singh gave them votes and they let him lord it over the Wrestling Federation of India.

There were demonstrations everywhere and there were times, at least on television, that suggested the dawn of a new era but neither the kinetic energy associated with the protest nor institutional resources sufficed. The retaliatory action ebbed, and ebbed. The alliance at the Centre was too powerful for anything the others attempted, maybe for their own reasons, including Mamata Banerjee’s rally in the heart of Kolkata.

The dramatic rush to – and the aimless return from – Hardwar spoke of the lack of a plan. Also, when it came to the crunch, even the khap panchayats of northern India were not of much help. Sometimes people asked the wrestlers why they let politicians into the protest and sometimes, why not. The answer was difficult to find in a confused maze. But India clearly failed them.