Bengaluru: A court battle of a different kind awaits ace shuttler and Arjuna Awardee Lakshya Sen whose parents, brother and coach, have been accused of misrepresenting the 21-year-old’s age to help him gain a competitive advantage in younger categories since 2010. Ranked world no. 6, Sen — who was runner-up in the All England Championships in March — is one of the country’s top-performing badminton stars.
A case of cheating (IPC section 420) and forgery (IPC section 468) was filed against Sen in Bengaluru last week, among other serious charges which, if proved, can have serious implications not just on his career but badminton in India as a whole.
Asked to comment on the case, Nirmala Sen, Lakshya’s mother, told ThePrint that it was not uncommon to see those who are “jealous” making such allegations against people who “become famous”.
“The records are quite clear. So I don’t know how these allegations are cropping up but once we are called by advocates, we will give all the proof. Lakshya has been in the limelight for the last so many years and everyone knows what his actual age is,” she added.
Nilesh, a petitioner who had moved the Karnataka High Court in 2018 asking for directions to be issued to sports authorities to check instances of age fraud said that in India, “unfortunately, the winner gets it all”.
“If you win, you get sponsorship, go to a good academy, free travel and other perks, the press also only talks about them. Similarly, Lakshya got everything and several Karnataka players have left sports because they did not get anything,” he added.
Though the allegations against Lakshya are yet to be established in a court of law, the complaint against him has brought focus back on age fraud in Indian sports.
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‘Unlike doping, age fraud easy to clean up’
The FIR against Lakshya Sen was filed Thursday by one MG Nagaraj, accusing him, his parents Dhirendra and Nirmala Sen, brother and fellow shuttler Chirag Sen, and his coach Vimal Kumar of fudging Lakshya’s birth certificates to allow him to compete in younger categories for longer.
The case surfaced four years after a bench of the Karnataka HC ordered emergent notices to the Badminton Association of India (BAI), Sports Authority of India (SAI) and others on a petition filed by 37 parents who had sought directions to the BAI to consider and implement measures suggested by them to check instances of age fraud.
In their petition to the Karnataka High Court, the petitioners have said that several parents have resorted to submitted fudged birthdates or “delayed birth certificates” after obtaining a BAID, a unique registration number from the BAI for all players.
Nilesh, one of the petitioners, claimed he first filed a complaint against Chirag Sen in 2015 and subsequent investigations by SAI and Sports Integrity Unit — sports arm of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) — “proved them (petitioners) right”.
By fudging the age, a player who is at least two-three years older with the same skill set is likely to have an advantage against the younger opponent, he said.
Nilesh also told ThePrint: “Most people leave sports by the age of 17 since they don’t win anything because at 17, playing against a 20-year-old and winning is next to impossible if both have the same skills.”
In June, the BAI — in the wake of cases of age fraud surfacing in the All India Sub-Junior Under-13 ranking tournament in Hyderabad — had declared that it was forming a panel to conduct a thorough probe into the complaints, adding that those found guilty could even face a two-year ban.
“It is a countrywide problem in sports and the clean up is very easy like the Chess Federation of India has done for so many years. Unlike doping which is a very technical thing, age can be cleaned up very easily,” Nilesh said.
According to the petitioner’s filings, the BAI has adopted the Tanner-Whitehouse (TW3) method based on radiographs of the left hand and wrist.
According to the petition filed in the HC in 2018, “Radiographic assessments are influenced by ethnic variations and living conditions (nutrition, diseases).”
The petition went further to point out that though skeletal age is said to be the most accurate method of assessing biological maturity, the “assessment of skeletal age by x-ray scanning is limited and does not allow a precise determination of the chronological age”.
“Variations up to several years in bone age have been observed in adolescents of the same chronological age and this would always throw up a variation which does not help in precise determination of age and thus in slotting the players in various age categories,” the petition read.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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