At Olympics, India’s top women wrestlers have more at stake than medals

Rohtak, India – On a hot summer afternoon, a strapping, fit man in his 30s drove his SUV to the outskirts of the crowded city of Rohtak in the northern Indian state of Haryana. Peeling off the main road, he braked at a large white metal gate of a sports stadium. The gate hadn’t been opened in years and the stadium looked empty. It was the only place he felt safe, he said, to meet and talk.

“You can’t use my name, and you can’t use hers,” the man, wearing a loose grey T-shirt, black basketball shorts and slippers, said.

The air conditioning in the SUV was on full blast, but the chill didn’t calm his nerves. He made sure I put away my recorder – the sight of it made him nervous. Then he began narrating a chilling account of one of the most powerful men in Indian sports, accused of sexually abusing young wrestlers for at least a decade.

“When she told me about her sexual harassment, I wept,” the man in the SUV, the guardian of one of the women wrestlers, said while staring down at the car’s floor, suddenly sounding weary.

Different versions of this story had played out on Indian television channels, and the streets of the country’s capital, for months. The victims were many, the man accused of tormenting them the same: Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI).

Yet it didn’t end with the sexual harassment, the man in the SUV told me, even as he kept checking the rear-view mirror and repeating, “I am scared when I drive.”

Singh, he said, is now using his political clout and network of friends, collaborators and lackeys in Indian wrestling and the wider sporting bureaucracy, to harass and intimidate his victims into silence.

“I am scared that I may be killed and her career will be destroyed,” he said.

His words echoed those of India’s top freestyle wrestlers, many of them Olympians and world champions, who began a sit-in protest on a pavement near the Indian Parliament in New Delhi in January last year, demanding that Singh be sacked from the WFI and investigated over allegations that he had sexually harassed female wrestlers since 2012.