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Journalism of Courage
“This is not like another demand,” said a wrestling coach in Chhara village in Jhajjar district of Haryana. “Yeh humari izzat aur maan samman ki ladai hai…Iske liye kuch bhi ho sakta hai.”
The images on May 28 of the protesting wrestlers being pushed around, dragged, manhandled, and arrested by the police had disturbed — and angered — many across the country. Even more disturbing was the content of the FIRs by seven women wrestlers, including a minor, reported in The Indian Express, that they had allegedly been molested, sexually harassed, inappropriately touched and sexual favours sought from them by the head of the Wrestling Foundation of India, Brij Bhushan Saran Singh, also a BJP MP.
Ironically, the wrestlers’ dharna has gathered momentum after the Delhi Police forced them to get out of Jantar Mantar.
To get a sense of how this is echoing beyond the confines of the capital, I drove to Haryana, stopped in several villages, talked to those gathered at wayside tea shops, visited wrestling akhadas run for men and women, spoke to sarpanches of both Jat-dominated and “mixed” villages, inhabited by communities other than Jats.
Two things ring loud and clear.
There’s no one, not one voice, Jat or non Jat, pro-Congress or BJP-sympathetic, who did not ask for “immediate action” against accused Brij Bhushan Singh.
“We want Brij Bhushan Singh to be immediately arrested,” said the young women wrestlers in Chhara village — “nahin toh aagey jaakar humare saath kya hoga.” So did the men wrestlers at a nearby akhara.
“At the least, he should be divested of his positions for any independent inquiry to take place which is difficult enough given his money power and the fact that he is a Bahubali,” said the sarpanch of a non-Jat village in Gurgaon district, and he was a Yadav.
The second thing which struck me was this: there’s no one I met who did not believe in the wrestlers’ story.
It is not possible, they said, for so many women to make such a serious allegation which can bring them “badnami” without there being “some truth” in what they are saying. After all, they said, these are iconic figures who have achieved laurels for the country and who gain little by “conspiring” against Brij Bhushan Singh.
Of course, the episode will have its political fallout when elections are held a year down the line for the Lok Sabha and a little later in 2024 for the Assembly. As it is, the BJP government headed by ML Khattar has been on the back foot.
The popular upsurge against the Delhi rape in 2012 was by and large an urban phenomenon. But the Sakshi-Vinesh-Bajrang agitation can have its fallout in both urban and rural areas. As an ex-serviceman in Gurgaon said: “Nirbhaya led to the hanging of the accused; here you have not even arrested him despite damaging FIRs.”
Had it been an Opposition MP, by now he would have been suspended and put in jail, many in Haryana said.
Why no action against Brij Bhushan Singh?
They themselves hazarded a guess — because UP is to BJP (80 Lok Sabha seats) more important than is Haryana (10 Lok Sabha seats). The UP vs Haryana conundrum –wrestler after wrestler told me how Brij Bhushan Singh has over the years tried to do downplay Haryana’s contribution to wrestling — has made the issue not just one about women’s safety but also imbued it with a sub-nationalism which can prove to be more emotive than the BJP may have bargained for.
The non-action by the government is all the more tragic because it has set off deep anxieties amid parents of budding wrestlers in Haryana.
Said an akhada trainer: “At least 20 guardians of girls have told me, ‘We can’t take this kind of a risk with our daughters…..Thoda thoda dar lagne laga hai.’” The fear is they may either pull them out of wrestling or shift them into other sports.
This, when the medal winning women wrestlers had represented a social transformation unimagined even 20 years ago—in a state which had the worst sex ratio in the country in 2011 (830 women to 1000 men), a state which became known for honour killings when girls went out of line in the choice of their marriage partners.
But today, instead of confining their girls to sit in front of the “choolha,” family after family is encouraging them to do higher studies, apply for civil services, and take to a sport like wrestling even though they have to be trained by men—and aspire to make their mark on the world stage.
Vinesh and Sakshi are symbols of that change. Tears flowing, as they went to Haridwar to immerse their medals in the Ganga — this now is at risk. Fortunately, they held back.
Despite the damage its policy of drift is doing the ruling party — even as it went through the motions of setting up a committee—it has really not acted. It is unfortunate that the BJP sees any dissenting voice as a conspiracy to delegitimize it.
In 1998, when the Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Mahendra Singh Tikait had sat on a dharna against the rise in fertiliser prices, then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee had immediately despatched his Agriculture Minister Som Pal to engage with Tikait. Vajpayee told Som Pal, “Asantosh barhta hai toh phir aasani se rukta nahin,”.
Brij Bhushan Singh is undoubtedly a powerful Rajput leader in UP and has been a Lok Sabha MP for 28 years. He was in the Samajwadi Party and joined the BJP in 2014—and is supposedly able to influence the outcome in half a dozen Lok Sabha constituencies, right up to the border of Ayodhya.
And the Ram mandir is an important showpiece in the BJP’s strategy with its inauguration in January 2024 in the run-up to the general elections. It is said that the BJP needs Brij Bhushan Singh more than he needs the BJP. There are, of course, those within the party who believe that he will have to be sacrificed but the party brass wants to do it, after showing him that they did all they could do to save him.
The question then arises: Can the popular and all-powerful prime minister be held hostage by an MP, even though he may be a Bahubali, influential in 5-6 constituencies and from the crucial state of Uttar Pradesh which the PM has made his karmabhoomi?
Particularly when there is another powerful constituency beyond UP: women, women, women. No party today can afford to forget that women are emerging as a new caste in India.
For a moment, though, forget even that emerging reality. The fortunes of parties will ebb and rise, political leaders will come and go. But India can never become a confident, forward-looking nation unless its women can walk with their heads held high—and in safety.
It is Narendra Modi who had encouraged sportspersons through his various “Mann ki baats”; he reached out to the downcast Indian women’s hockey team when they lost at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, and told them to “stop crying…India is proud of you”. Women all over the country have voted for him in large numbers.
Why, then, this silence now, Pradhan Mantriji?
(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 10 Lok Sabha elections)
