Update, June 16, 2023, at 11 a.m.: On Thursday, local media outlets reported, Indian police released a 1,500-page report on former wrestling chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, formally charging him with the jailable offenses of sexually harassing, stalking, and assaulting women. Our June 11 story on how the national protests against Singh led to this moment reads below as originally published.
Narendra Modi isn’t used to backing down. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister and his allies are adept at suppressing opposition from a distance, utilizing police brutality, mob violence, broad censorship, and internet shutoffs. But there have been cracks as of late: their capitulation to the massive farmers’ protests in 2021, their party’s losses in recent state elections, their scramble to reconfigure campaign strategy. Now, one more grassroots movement has forced Modi’s government to publicly accede to its demands, led by a persistent group of some India’s most celebrated athletes—its internationally renowned women wrestlers.
It took almost everything they had. The wrestlers have been speaking out for six months now, demanding that someone, anyone in India’s state institutions—law enforcement, courts, local and national authorities—take seriously their allegations of sexual misconduct against one of the country’s most powerful sportsmen: Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, president of the Wrestling Federation of India and an elected member of Parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Throughout the year, the protesters have gathered in New Delhi, occupying buildings and holding marches with allies to demand that Indian authorities properly investigate Singh, strip him of his power, and make Indian wrestling a safer environment for its women. Lack of proper shelter, punishing heat waves, throngs of mosquitoes, surges of online harassment, waves of police violence—it took facing down all of these challenges, for months on end, before they gained acknowledgement from the powers that be.
Last week, some members of Modi’s Cabinet personally met with the athletes, including Sports Minister Anurag Thakur, who conferred with them for nearly six hours on Wednesday. After that meeting, Thakur announced some good news for the wrestlers: Police charges that had been filed against them for their Delhi rallies would be dropped, a planned investigation into Singh would be wrapped up by next week, and he would be ousted as WFI president by the end of the month. In response, the wrestlers agreed to temporarily halt their protest—though they warned it would start right back up if those conditions are not satisfied. For the time being, it does appear as though the new investigation is making serious progress, with individual wrestlers and even international referees relating their sordid experiences with Singh to the police.
How did the wrestlers notch this win? It all started with some phone calls. In mid-January, the Indian Express reported, several women who’d signed up to attend a prestigious training camp in the city of Lucknow decided to contact Vinesh Phogat, a two-time World Wrestling Championships medalist who hails from a family dynasty of famous athletes. These women told Phogat they were afraid of the camp—that they knew rumors of rampant sexual harassment by the mostly male coaches, that they heard the Lucknow camp would foster an “unsafe environment,” and that they’d rather boycott or leave the sport than face this for themselves. Bhushan Singh in particular, the trainees emphasized, was not just the head of this rotten wrestling culture—he was an active participant in the coaches’ mistreatment of women wrestlers, belittling and intimidating anyone who dared seek help. From his pedestal of power, Singh reportedly felt free to grope the women wrestlers, solicit them for sex, and retaliate against the athletes who refused him.
It wasn’t the first time Phogat had heard such accusations, and she’d already been well aware of the sexual misconduct that occurs across Indian sports. In fact, she later told the BBC, she’d even informed Prime Minister Narendra Modi of Singh’s misconduct when she met him after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. So the January calls became the moment that Phogat decided they had to go public—and that she had to tell her own stories of being “mentally harassed and tortured” by Singh. But it was going to be tough, considering that Singh has enjoyed a life of impunity—having brushed off dozens of criminal charges for fomenting violence against Muslims, assisting Indian mafia terrorists, and even attempting to murder political rivals.
On Jan. 18, Phogat and other celebrity wrestlers (including some Olympic medalists) arranged a sit-in at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar observatory, at which they spoke to the press about these allegations. The next few days demonstrated the immediate impact: The Lucknow camp was canceled, sports regulators met with the protesters and demanded answers from the Wrestling Foundation of India, the WFI convened an emergency meeting, active and retired wrestlers across the country flocked to Jantar Mantar to join its hundreds of protesters in solidarity, and Phogat fielded even more phone calls from women with lurid stories about Singh and his coaches. Politicians of all ideologies released supportive statements on the protests—rather notable in a moment when certain politicians prefer to attack rallygoers—and Phogat posted a letter to the Indian Olympic Association that spelled out the complaints against Singh and demanded that the WFI close altogether.
Even though Singh and the WFI denied everything, the sit-in appeared to be a success. On Jan. 21, the Sports Ministry announced an oversight committee to probe WFI, and temporarily replaced the governing body’s leadership. This inspired the wrestlers to call off the gathering for the time being, although they stated they would not compete internationally until all their demands—including Singh’s outright firing—were met. Still, it seemed like a group of exploited women were finally being heard by their government, for once.
Yet months passed by without any update, and without any changes to Indian wrestling’s leadership and structure. The government committee submitted a private report in April, and anonymous sources leaked details to the Deccan Herald—primarily, that the committee found no evidence of harassment. The angered wrestlers reconvened in Jantar Mantar on April 23 to restart the protests and inform observers that seven female wrestlers, including one minor, had filed charges against Singh with the Delhi Police, only to hear nothing in return. They took their case to the Supreme Court, which ordered the Delhi Police to act quickly; meanwhile, at the Sports Ministry’s request, the Indian Olympic Association formed a subsidiary panel to take charge of the WFI, even as the IOA’s president scoffed at the protesters’ tactics. The women did not budge, declaring on April 28 that they would stay put in New Delhi until Singh was jailed.
It was soon after this that the government’s supposedly empathetic stance toward the wrestlers fell away, and its response became harsher and uglier, a much more typical example of how it treats Indians demanding justice—no matter how famed and decorated.
On May 3, Phogat and her fellow wrestlers told local media that Delhi’s law enforcement had attacked them late that night, with individual cops striking, injuring, and even arresting participants at the observatory for the alleged crime of setting up “folding beds without permission.” Cellphone footage of the violence went viral, showing how even a local politician was manhandled by the police.
Just days after, the Economic Times reported on the April charges that seven wrestlers had filed to those very police, in which they accused the Sports Ministry’s investigative committee of “tampering” with their recorded testimonies and blithely dismissing many of the allegations. (The committee has denied this.) Instead of taking them seriously, the wrestlers charged, the committee characterized Singh’s misdeeds as “act[s] of innocence done in good faith,” mere mistakes that the wrestlers had “interpreted in a wrongful manner.” Moreover, Sakshi Malik, a 2016 Olympics bronze medalist, told the Indian Express that the “girls who complained [to the police] received threats” over the phone and even at their schools.
The authorities’ hostility toward the wrestlers was condemned by notable Indians like Olympic gold medalist Neeraj Chopra, former tennis star Sania Mirza, and even Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. It also inspired a broader coalition of movements beyond India’s athletes: Farmers who had participated in 2021’s massive, staggeringly successful rallies against national agricultural policy came to join the wrestlers at Jantar Mantar.
The wrestlers likely were able to garner such high-level support because their powerful allies understood something important: If you had to pick just one exemplar of India’s historic, proud, wide-ranging sporting legacy, you could hardly go wrong with professional wrestling. The subcontinent’s traditions of amateur tussling date back to ancient times—back to the 5th century B.C.—and key figures from Indian epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata are depicted as having godly wrestling skill. Some of India’s most iconic athletes were pinning down international heavyweights by the early 20th century, and their descendants have racked up hundreds of medals from competitions like the Asian Wrestling and World Wrestling championships, the Asian Games and Commonwealth Games, and the Olympics. Today, wrestling is a ubiquitous part of modern Indian society and pop culture, with regional variations on the game practiced in major states, wrestling champions being considered national heroes, and often-disenfranchised female athletes benefiting from specialized programs.
Indian wrestling is not just a sport—it’s a place of empowerment. And patriotic Indians revere these national heroes. That, right there, is something that their government missed.
On Sunday, May 28, as Modi led the opening of a controversial new Parliament building, the wrestlers and their allies marched to disrupt the ceremony; as they reached the building’s security barriers, hundreds of officers halted, grabbed, dragged away, and arrested the marchers, including Phogat, her sister, and Sakshi Malik. A photo they tweeted while sitting in a police bus was doctored to show them smiling instead of frowning; the image traveled across social media but was roundly debunked. As the athletes were carted away, officers headed to Jantar Mantar to seize the protesters’ belongings and take down their campsites.
State politicians and former Supreme Court justices decried the police brutality, and a group of 1,150 prominent Indian activists co-signed an open letter “stand[ing] in complete solidarity with the wrestlers” and demanding their release, along with Singh’s arrest. United World Wrestling, the international governing body for the sport, released a statement opposing the arrests and threatening to ban the WFI if a proper and fair investigation wasn’t planned. Even alumni of India’s legendary 1983 World Cup–winning cricket team criticized the arrests. And Progressive International put together an open letter, signed by politicians and academics from Europe and South America, “stand[ing] in solidarity with the protesting athletes and demand[ing] accountability from the Indian government.”
It was perhaps this global support that fueled the wrestlers to dial things up; now, they were going to publicly discard and despoil the medals they’d won for representing India, a nation that clearly did not care for their actual well-being—that perceived them as little more than trophies. The plan for Tuesday was that wrestlers would carry their international accolades to the banks of the sacred Ganga River and cast them within, forever. “This holy river is the perfect custodian of our medals, not the system that shields the offender,” they declared in a statement.
Ultimately, both the farmers and the ’80s cricketeers persuaded them to postpone this gesture for the time being—but the wrestlers said they would carry it out if Singh isn’t held accountable. They also threatened to go on an indefinite hunger strike. Sakshi Malik has not hesitated to compare their marches with those of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent anti-colonialism, labeling their struggle as a form of satyagraha. On June 1, elected officials from India’s liberal Congress Party joined wrestlers in the Delhi streets to start the protests all over again, while most BJP politicians tended to either avoid the issue or urge an immediate solution. (One notable exception: The BJP home minister of Malik and Phogat’s home state, Haryana, referred to them as “national heroes.”) Thronging rallies also popped up in the states of Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal.
June 2 saw another significant development: the full unveiling of the wrestlers’ April police reports. The nauseating details within include so-far-undisclosed accusations that Singh stalked the wrestlers, molested them repeatedly, offered physique-boosting supplements in exchange for sex, and threatened to blacklist one athlete who shook off his advances. This, more than anything, may have sealed Singh’s fate—he will not be allowed to contest the upcoming elections for the WFI’s leadership, nor will any members of his family. Whether he gets arrested or stripped of governmental power, however, remains to be seen.
The monthslong, tireless wrestlers’ protests have proved, once again, that the popular spirit of democracy has not died in India, even as Modi’s party corrupts the country’s institutions and stifles free speech every way that it can. It may also be a sign of the BJP’s vulnerabilities, blindsided as the party has been by its all-out loss in Karnataka’s recent state elections, the spirited opposition to Modi’s new Parliament building, and the refusal by Uttar Pradesh’s BJP governors to allow Singh to hold a rally in the state this week—even though he represents a constituency from that very state in Parliament. (Incidentally, Singh had planned to advocate for weakening India’s Protection of Children From Sexual Offenses Act.) And, perhaps most importantly, the wrestlers’ initiative not only adds to the myriad justice movements that have sprung up during Modi’s regime, but even encapsulates and builds upon them: the aforementioned farmers’ marches, the #MeToo accusations that exposed some of Bollywood’s most sinister men, the outrage over Modi’s fatal COVID mismanagement, the repeated protests against the country’s pervasive rape culture, and even last year’s ouster of India’s national cycling coach, who was also accused of sexual harassment. BJP leaders may consider themselves patriots, but there’s hardly anyone more patriotic than the wrestlers who’ve so strongly represented India on the world stage. Finally, the Modi administration has found itself pinned.