India’s 2024 Olympic journey in Paris will be remembered less for its final medal tally–India won one less medal in Paris than in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics—but more for the way freestyle wrestling champion Vinesh Phogat dominated the headlines.
Phogat is not just a sportsperson. She represents a social breakthrough, a liberation from the norm, and an image of tough self-reliant independence. She’s unafraid to defy paternalistic authority, unbending in the face of assault, ready to scream, protest on the street and risk her all for the sake of her mission.
Indian social mores frown upon rebellious women. Establishmentarian forces compel women to conform. But Phogat has set a new trend of defiant womanly courage. The envelope on women’s freedoms remains tightly closed. But the wrestling champion has pushed that envelope just a little.
The cost of rebellion
Petite, fearless, sometimes beaming, sometimes tearful Phogat captured our hearts. She was our focus in Paris. We celebrated with her when she, most remarkably, defeated the undefeated world champion Yui Susaki of Japan and came within a whisker of claiming India’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in wrestling. We held our breaths as she prepared for the final, only to suffer national heartbreak when she was disqualified on rather unfathomable technicalities.
We learned of her epic night before the finals—how she stayed up through the night, didn’t eat a morsel, jogged, skipped, cycled, sat sweating in a sauna, suffered through spells of dizziness, and even trimmed her hair and singlet to shed the last 100 grams to qualify for the 50 kg final. When she failed at the weighing-in, coming in a mere 100 gms over 50 kg, 1.2 billion Indians plunged into heartache.
Surely, Phogat could have been better served by the sporting establishment. The Vinesh Phogat incident is an example of how India’s patriarchal, VIP-packed sports management bodies continually fail sportspersons and athletes. The dismissiveness and condescension with which they were treated forced Phogat and her fellow Olympic wrestling champions to protest on the streets against the BJP’s six-time MP and strongman leader Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then head of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI), for alleged sexual harassment.
The Modi government refused to act against Brij Bhushan who remained a BJP MP even though he was suspended from WFI. The sports ministry continued to call the shots over the wrestlers and Brij Bhushan’s proxy Sanjay Singh became the President of WFI. No one listened to Phogat. She has alleged that she did not get the medical and physiotherapy attention that she needed. In the end, she was forced to compete in the 50 kg category when her preferred category was 53 kg.
An injustice was done to Phogat. Those who compete for Olympic medals must be given every facility, medical attention and high-level expert attention. But Phogat was made to pay a price for her defiance.
Today, Phogat’s story is significant for reasons far beyond the wrestling mat. She is the focus of collective sympathy and remorse and embodies the suffering of India’s elite sports persons at the hands of a remorseless cluelessly meddling government.
Phogat’s appeal is still pending at the Council for Arbitration of Sports (CAS), yet her story is no longer about whether she wins a medal or not. She is a symbol of how women who challenge authority, be it in sports or other fields, still have a mountain to climb. Phogat and her fellow women wrestlers took on the all-male wrestling federation, a patriarchal heavyweight like Brij Bhushan, who was known as a domineering figure who wanted full control over the wrestlers’ lives and careers. This asymmetry of power, where women win Olympic medals and sports federations are entirely run by politically well-connected men, is highly antithetical to modern sports management. Why is there not a single woman heading a major sports body? The only exception, Indian Olympic President, former athletics champion, and Rajya Sabha member P. T Usha, is hardly assertive, obeying the government line all the time. Phogat raised her voice against this suffocating bureaucratic dominance and paid a price.
But then why only sports? An implacable intolerance of defiant, irrepressible women extends to corporate boardrooms, newsrooms and even the political sphere. Women, however high achieving, are constantly asked to prove themselves, and if they make the “mistake” of challenging male authority, they are immediately beaten back, ostracised or shunned.
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Assertive women of India
Let’s look at politics. Contrast how the BJP has dealt with former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and former Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, both regional stalwarts who won their states in the winter Assembly polls of 2023. They spearheaded their party’s victory but were dropped from the chief minister’s post and replaced. Chouhan fell in line, very much a part of the RSS-BJP brotherhood, and was soon rewarded with the Ministry of Agriculture. Raje, always regarded as the stylish, English-speaking “outsider,” refused to toe the line. Instead, she asserted herself as someone who, as the BJP’s most popular face in Rajasthan and two-time CM, deserved to be chief minister once again.
The “rebellious” Raje was immediately cast out of the durbar. Instead of reaching out to her, the BJP leadership shunned her, a poor decision that took a heavy toll on the BJP’s Lok Sabha performance in Rajasthan. The spirited Uma Bharti, former BJP minister, staged a public outburst against her party leadership in 2004 and was immediately suspended. The eloquent Sushma Swaraj blazed a trail in Parliament as leader of the Opposition but was cut to size in the Modi government, where even as External Affairs Minister, she was not allowed to helm foreign policy. Women politicians who refuse to stay confined within the “lakshman rekha” of subordinate, supportive roles to male leaders find themselves out in the cold.
West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee was always a natural-born leader with a terrific mass connect and effortless charisma. But in 1998, she was forced to leave the Congress because the entrenched male leadership would not give her the space to grow. She created her own political start-up and soon proved herself, by sheer dint of talent, as the real face of the Congress in Bengal. Such success stories are all too rare in politics, which is why today India has only one woman chief minister.
In the world of cinema too, in the early years of the film industry, women actors were expected to conform to a “virtuous” subordinate image off-screen as well as on-screen. Women actors like Nargis, Madhubala, or Meena Kumari, who were highly successful professionals and insisted on autonomy in their personal lives, were stigmatised as the “other” woman or as disruptive individuals, regarded as the binary opposites of the conventional family-oriented norm. It took a Zeenat Aman in the 1970s to break the mould and create a modern persona on screen.
Aman was unafraid to be seen smoking a chillum or swinging in hipster bell bottoms—a US-educated modern woman who defied stereotypes. Yet even at the time, Aman faced shrieky moral policing about her relationship choices and personal life. It is only today, in 2024, that 72-year-old Zeenat Aman has been rediscovered via social media as a thinking professional and an artiste who battled multiple challenges to express herself and realise her ambitions. From being a stereotyped “sex symbol,” Aman has at last been humanised as a woman of agency and thoughtfulness.
Defiant and self-expressive women in the media and the corporate world face similar challenges. Women journalists who dare to question the government are viciously trolled online; the tag “controversial” stamped on their foreheads like a kind of “witch” branding. Within newsrooms, they are regarded as troublesome presences who must either be forced to toe the line or be denied positions of leadership. When even a distinguished industry leader like entrepreneur Kiran Mazumdar Shaw expresses opinions online, she is often relentlessly trolled.
This is precisely why Vinesh Phogat’s story of rebellion and triumph is much more than simply the story of a professional wrestler. Phogat comes from Haryana, where, according to the 2011 Census, the sex ratio was 879 women for 1,000 men, well below the national average of 940. Haryana is known for its khap panchayats, which are notorious for quelling women’s rights. Phogat has broken through several severe barriers, and emerged as a phenomenon which is rare in India—a publicly assertive, successful professional woman unafraid to look male authorities in the eye.
India has a long way to go on winning more Olympic medals. We also have a long way to go in celebrating women who are unafraid to be different, express their identities and challenge traditional ways of thinking. For inspiration, we may gaze on Sifan Hassan, the remarkable Ethiopian-born Dutch middle-distance runner who won the women’s marathon gold medal and two other distance medals in the Paris Olympics. Hassan is a refugee who arrived in the Netherlands and ran in her recreational hours while training to be a nurse. Talent, charisma, and defiance in a woman are not social evils to be stamped out; they must be nurtured and celebrated if we want to be a nation of champions in sports as well as other fields.
The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP, All India Trinamool Congress. She tweets @sagarikaghose. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Im not in the least surprised that Print has published an article full for lies rants and half truths from a discredited journalist, who alongwith her husband, the readers take with a large barrelful of salt..
Biased article . For athlete it was her 3 rd Olympic
She was very well aware of rule of games . Even other wrestlers were also disqualified before due to same rule.
It was her responsibility to maintain her weight in check within prescribed limit, which she failed to do.
Why so much noice on this ?
Keep politics out of sports and respect sports and play with spirit of the game.
Shame on people who are talking rubbish and either never played a game or don’t know how a game should be played – with honesty within rules and with sportsmanship. Period