Vinesh Phogat: A girl called Courage

(This Lounge piece was first published on 2 September 2024. Mint is reposting this after Vinesh Phogat joined the Congress on Friday, ahead of the Haryana assembly elections.)

In Paris Vinesh Phogat emerged for her first bout markedly different from the last time she was in the public eye. For months barely anyone had seen her. She had been in a training cave, shunning all media, ignoring the legal matters swirling around her life lately. It was a miracle she was even at the Olympics.

Bruised by her fight for the right of women athletes to go unmolested, she was battered and broken quite literally too. Her left knee had been operated so recently it defied sense that she was already fighting on the world’s biggest stage. The other knee had undergone surgery earlier. An elbow had been operated, twice. A concussion seven years ago was so severe its effect never left her. And, through the force of events spanning 18 tumultuous months, she was competing in a weight class lower than she preferred.

Lean, rock-hard in her textured blue singlet, a short bob, sleeves over both knees, Vinesh prepared to face a fighter who had only ever lost to one wrestler, and to none in her 82 international contests. While breezing to gold in the Tokyo Olympics, Japan’s Yui Susaki, the world No.1, the greatest pound-for-pound freestyle wrestler in the women’s game, did not concede a single point. Some saw this wretched draw as a blessing in disguise: under the repechage system, wrestlers who were defeated in the early rounds still had a shot at bronze if they lost to a finalist. Vinesh could, therefore, go down to Susaki and still get third place.

This was not a calculation that excited Vinesh. Her energies were concentrated on this particular contest of physical chess, as wrestling is sometimes described. Over 6 minutes where time seemed to stand still, and sometimes the competitors, she stared down her colossal adversary. Agile in defence, uninterested in attack, she twice conceded a passivity point, not even attempting to score after the second warning. As the bout went deep, the commentator apprehended the rising tension. “Yui Susaki will know exactly what to do and when to do it.” Susaki expected Vinesh to blink. She didn’t blink before the might of the Indian state and its most powerful men, and she was going to blink now? It was 9 seconds to the whistle when she hustled Susaki to the edge of the mat and into a takedown, drawing level on points—and ahead on the technicality that this was the higher-scoring move. “This is the biggest shock of all shocks at the Olympic wrestling!” the commentator yelled as Vinesh leapt into the air, fell back spread-eagled on the mat, screaming and crying in release. “In all wrestling!”

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That evening, as Vinesh, now in red, walked out for her semi-final, having defeated a Ukranian along the way, the commentator sombrely recounted the excruciating moment in Rio 2016 when she was stretchered off with a ghastly knee injury. “Many wondered whether they’d see her again as a wrestler.” Here, riding this sublime athletic momentum of confidence and form, she ate up her Cuban opponent with such skill and grace you barely needed to know the sport to feel her excellence. Her Hungarian coach, Woller Akos, was weeping. Vinesh only had a calm smile; there was work ahead. A three-time Commonwealth gold-medallist, an Asian Games winner, a two-time World Championship medallist was a step away from becoming the first Indian woman to ever win gold at the Olympics in any discipline. “It is one of the greatest comebacks the sport has seen!” went the commentator.

A little later Vinesh registered 52.7 kilograms on the scales, triggering a night with no end.

Casting aside her exhaustion, she trained on the mat, skipped rope, ran and cycled in a sweat suit, worked the cardio machines, 45-minute sessions with 2-minute breaks, melting off gram by treacherous gram. She trimmed the elastic in her singlet, the hair on her head (but even long braids only weigh about 30g, wrestler Seema Bisla once said). She drank nothing, ate nothing, slept no minutes. She cooked herself in the sauna, where her prospective opponent in the final, the American Sarah Hildebrandt—“a big weight cutter myself” —spotted her in the morning and sensed something. She wrung every drop of hydration from herself, until she could draw no more. “I only remember thinking she might die,” wrote Akos in a Facebook post since deleted. Coming in 100g over the 50kg limit at the 7-7.15a.m. weigh-in, she stuck her fingers down her throat, upchucked no further grams, collapsed and was put on drip.

This was a heartbreak so large, on a margin so paltry, it was beyond measurement on any sporting Richter. Its particular cruelty was that it happened to the most courageous sportsperson her country has ever produced, which was also its feeble consolation.

*****

Consider once more the brutal business of cutting weight.

In Enter the Dangal (2016), Rudraneil Sengupta presents us pehelwan Sushil Kumar, “in a toilet in the Olympic village in London, vomiting up even the electrolytes he has been given”. After his first bout the next day, he collapses. Two further wins later, “His eyes have sunk into their sockets. His knees are buckling… If he takes even a sip of water, he throws up.” Sushil’s body has malfunctioned from the stress of cutting weight.

Combat athletes try to fight in the lowest feasible weight class so as not to be disadvantaged against bigger fighters in a higher one. Sushil competed over a single day, having to make weight just once. From Tokyo 2020 the medal bouts were moved to a second day, essentially to deter weight-cutting.

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Vinesh wasn’t India’s only combatant who struggled to make weight in Paris. Boxer Nikhat Zareen survived on water for two days. Aman Sehrawat worked off an almighty 4.5kg the night before his bronze-medal fight. The wrestler who dismantled Sehrawat before getting to gold, Japan’s Rei Higuchi, knew it all too well: he’d missed his home Olympics for 50g, and he reassured Vinesh. “Life goes on. Rising from setbacks is the most beautiful thing.” Antim Panghal, the talented young wrestler who secured the 53kg slot Vinesh wanted, starved herself for 48 hours and got teched in 100 seconds in the first round.

We might ask ourselves what lunatic fire burns inside an Olympian. It’s a question that often consumed Sakshi Malik, India’s only woman wrestling Olympic medallist. “In what hell are we living, we’re dying of hunger—for what?” she told the broadcaster the afternoon of Vinesh’s disqualification. “Why are we putting our bodies through such torture that we get visions of water—one drop of water we can put into our mouth?” And yet in that hell a voice would tell her: “Bhagwan, somebody chop off my hand, chop off any body part—just don’t keep me away from the medal.”

To viewers sport may operate at the level of drama, in heroic and tragic arcs, but to the athlete, the medal is real, the body all too real. Consider the absurd pressure the wrestler puts it under, building up her muscles, chopping off her hair, mangling her ears and breaking her nose, risking derision and ostracism, bruising, bleeding, starving and puking, gradually mastering her body, revelling in its capabilities, thrilling in its achievements, making her mark and sometimes history with it, the instrument of her agency and autonomy. While a so-called bahubali goes around helping himself to these bodies like he is owed them.

Without revisiting the sustained efforts to crush Vinesh, her allies, the women who spoke up, it is possible to understand neither her achievements nor the nation she gallantly represents.

*****

Think back to January last year and the first scenes of champion wrestlers Vinesh, Sakshi and Bajrang Punia protesting in Delhi’s winter chill. It took three days for the Centre to consider their allegations against the then Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief, BJP’s Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. The most abominable of those were sexual harassment of players the federation was meant to nurture.

Singh was a six-time MP, president of the WFI since 2012, an overlord and mogul said to own a helicopter and control some 50 educational institutes in and around his home district Gonda in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Booked and later acquitted in cases ranging from the Babri Masjid demolition to sheltering Dawood Ibrahim’s associates to murder, Singh allegedly ran the federation like a filmi zamindari. The Hindustan Times noted: “Officials bow to him, touch his feet, and chant ‘Neta ji zindabad’ as he settles in his chair.” Slapping a wrestler on stage, he bragged that had it been a hard one, “he would have landed far away”. This is the man the agitating wrestlers vowed to take down.

Sports minister Anurag Thakur eventually announced an “oversight committee”, chaired by boxer Mary Kom, and oversights it attempted. A committee member, wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt, known to be a Singh loyalist, Vinesh tweeted afterwards, would ring wrestlers’ families warning them “to keep their daughters under control”, and laugh when the women deposed. The committee tried to portray Singh as a “father figure” whose actions were “done in all innocence”, deposing wrestlers told The Indian Express.

The women then gathered the courage to lodge police complaints, but to have the FIR registered, the protesters had to move no less than the Supreme Court. Afterwards, excerpts from the 1,599-page chargesheet, published by The Indian Express, would paint an appalling picture of sexual harassment, spread over a decade, corroborated by witnesses. The allegations against Singh included groping, forcing himself on athletes, trying to bribe them for sexual favours, grooming, stalking and intimidation. Of the seven women who complained, one was a minor, making Singh liable for stringent punishment under the Pocso Act; her family retracted those charges.

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To get this far, the wrestlers spent five weeks on the footpaths at Jantar Mantar in the savage Delhi summer on a second protest. That upset Indian Olympic Association chief, P.T. Usha: street protests were acts of indiscipline that tarnished the country’s image. “We’re not on the road ji, we’re on the soil of our country,” Vinesh, then 28, schooled her. “As citizens of independent India, this is our right.”

The government, pro-establishment media, WhatsApp uncles, the line between these vanishingly thin, went all out to discredit the wrestlers: opposition plants, looking for a bypass to the Olympics, faking hardship for the cameras while leading pampered lives. An outing to the protest site might have disabused them.

We visited a couple of nights after two protestors had suffered head injuries in scuffles with the police over bringing cots into the site (a shower had soaked the mattresses on the footpath). It was a humid evening, and a warm breeze from a standing fan ruffled the mosquito nets drawn over the cots under a tarpaulin. It must have been another exhausting day of activism for Vinesh but the sight of a child interested her. In person, Vinesh is a magnetic presence. She possesses, of course, the physical aura of a champion athlete. Her eyes have a rooted sincerity and sometimes gleam with humour; in her manner is both an attentive humility and a radiant toughness. Taking our younger daughter, 3, into her arms, she dropped her earthy Haryanvi Hindi for baby talk: “Aap reh jao mere saath (stay back with me). Do you know me? My name is Vinesh. Vinesh.” A name given not by the family, her brother Harvinder would tell me, in a story he did not want to elaborate on, but by the uparwala. Vinesh, which sits beautifully, explosively beside vineet, courteous, and vinash, destruction.

“Yeh kya—Vinesh, Vinesh, Vinesh!” a voice shouted from the back, and her laughing face appeared: Sakshi Malik. A few metres away a giant banner listed the 38 criminal charges Singh had faced in his career. To be sure, a year out to the Games, this was not how the majority of the world’s Olympians were preparing. At that level, said Bajrang, a missed day of training can set you back a week. “If your game goes for a toss, what will you do for the rest of your career?” Vinesh was asked during the protest. “If my game going for a toss helps lakhs of girls find theirs then I’ll proudly do that,” she replied. It was no platitude. The evidence was before us—fitness, practice, diet, recovery, mental conditioning, thrown to the wind. Neither did she have any illusions about this struggle. “If we clear one hurdle, something else will come up,” she told The Indian Express. “But now that we have put our hand in the lion’s mouth, why be afraid!”

The police had tried to block access to the site. “You don’t understand,” the officer in charge told us one evening, “we have orders from above, this thing has become too big. From Haryana, UP, Punjab, the farmers are coming.” As the prime minister did not meet the farmers about their protest, he did not meet the protesting wrestlers.

On the day the new supersized Parliament building was inaugurated in May, the wrestlers planned a peaceful march to the venue. Among those at the function was the MP for whose arrest they were agitating. En route, police grabbed the marchers, Vinesh, her cousin Sangeeta, Sakshi, dragged them along the road as they resisted, screaming, holding on to the tricolour. The visuals juxtaposed against the regal scenes playing out in the “temple of democracy” nearby attracted attention across the world, but no comment from the government. “Naya desh mubarak ho,” Vinesh said to the cameras with an ironic smile as the police van took her away and booked her for rioting. Then, police dismantled the protest site at Jantar Mantar. Upon release, the wrestlers made their way to Haridwar, weeping as they considered immersing their international medals in the Ganga.

By December, Singh's men were in charge of the WFI, which prompted Sakshi to announce her retirement at a press conference, placing her wrestling shoes on the table in tears. Bajrang left his Padma Bhushan medal near the Prime Minister’s house. “There were 19 complainants in January but the number came down to 7 by April,” he wrote in an open letter to the Prime Minister, which he posted on X. “This means Brij Bhushan Singh exerted his influence on 12 women wrestlers.” Sakshi, Vinesh and Bajrang later challenged the WFI election in court. For the Lok Sabha election, the BJP gave the Kaiserganj ticket to Singh’s 33-year-old son, who now sits in Parliament. This Wednesday, Singh moved the Delhi high court asking it to quash all proceedings in a trial court in the sexual harassment case.

A recent Al Jazeera report details Singh’s continuing hold on Indian wrestling. Among its chilling contents is the story of a complainant framed in a doping case after her guardian received an anonymous call warning them to withdraw the allegations. Haryana, a decidedly conservative state yet home to all of India’s women wrestlers who went to Paris, saw a 50% drop in female enrolments.

If women’s participation now bounces back, it will owe in no small measure to Vinesh’s astonishing feats in Paris. To come within touching distance of Olympic gold after all this. What mitti was this person made of?

*****

When he got news of the disqualification, Abhinav Bindra wanted to vomit. Seasoned journalists found themselves in tears. The athletic marvels in the rest of the Games seemed to play out to a background score of cosmic injustice. Vinesh was not merely barred from the final—she was “eliminated”, to use the officialese, consigned to the bottom of the table. American wrestling legend Jordan Burroughs tweeted a set of sensible, humane changes to the rules. His “GIVE VINESH SILVER!” post racked up over 8 million views.

“What that girl is feeling right now none of us can imagine,” said Vinesh’s soul-sister Malik. “Not even me, and I have been through that phase.” And then Vinesh dropped her retirement post, addressed to her mother, slaying anyone with a heart.

Ma, kushti mere se jeet gayi mai haar gayi maaf karna aapka sapna meri himmat sab toot chuke... Ma, wrestling has defeated me, forgive me, your dreams, my spirit are all broken…

Even as she found herself powerless to overrule, the arbitrator, who heard the Indian appeal in the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), would note the “draconian” measure of obliterating the previous day’s victories.

Vinesh stuck around in Paris until the operative part of the verdict was announced.

Returning to Delhi, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a striped pink full-sleeved shirt, she emerged into the glare of the north Indian sun to dhol beats and rose petals. Sakshi took her in a tearful embrace; Bajrang put her upon his shoulders and transferred her to the top of a waiting SUV. Farmer groups greeted her, as did schoolchildren, flag-bearing members of NSUI, Congress MP Deepender Hooda, and practically alone from the BJP, Haryana’s Olympic medallist boxer Vijender Singh. Her mother was there.

Vinesh had not expected this. Harvinder had put out a route map, adding his phone number, mainly because he did not want misinformation he’d seen on social media to deprive anyone of a chance to welcome his sister. “Then every 3 minutes I started getting a call, until 3 in the morning,” he said.

Through the swelling, tree-free conurbations of the National Capital Region, then paddy and bajra fields, we made for Balali, 130km away, but Vinesh’s convoy made creeping progress.

Balali is a pucca village of 3,000, predominantly Jat, the men in all white, frequently gathered around a hookah, the rare woman outdoors in ghoonghat. Posters were up on the walls, on tractors, hanging off trees. Mhari chhori, khara sona. Our girl, pure gold.

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The gates were open at the Phogat home, a spacious two stories, with the Olympic rings tattooed into a glass façade on the first floor. This home of her mother and brother is where Vinesh repaired. She was eight, her mother recently diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer and given five years to live, when her father, a bus driver, was shot dead, by some accounts as he tried to intervene in a fight. Resisting the pressures of a levirate marriage, Premlata raised her three children singly. Being illiterate, when she travelled to Rohtak for treatment, she wouldn’t know where to get off, Vinesh would say. Her lack of education notwithstanding, she started up a micro-finance business, the first in the village by a woman. “When I think about courage I think about her,” Vinesh wrote in a gratitude post after the CAS verdict, “and it is this courage that helps me fight every fight without thinking about the outcome.”

In the house, her elder sister Priyanka, self-confessedly shy but also a protesting wrestler that long summer, said Premlata would provoke Vinesh with a strong mother’s forthrightness in order to rouse the competitive spirit evident since childhood, when she vied for top rank in class, and wrestling was just a duty as a Phogat girl—until winning a national-level medal woke her up to the possibilities. “And what exactly have you done?” the mother would say, “Just saying is not enough.”

The news of Vinesh’s disqualification had come into the house through neighbours and villagers, who gathered in an agitated state in the capacious living room with its double-height ceiling. On learning that Vinesh was in hospital, and no further details, Priyanka’s heart sank at the old memory of the concussion; medical opinion at the time had recommended she leave wrestling altogether. For a while, fearing the worst, dispersing the gathered, she delayed telling even one so hardy as Premlata what had happened.

Today, the long wait for the homecoming was leavened by clips and live-streams of the extraordinary welcome from the khaps and citizens of Haryana. No, the homecoming would not tire her in the least, everyone in the house concurred, quite the opposite—Vinesh doesn’t tire of people, she seeks their energy, their blessings, they will strengthen her. One yatri would tell us that 300-400 people collected at every bus stop. To another eyewitness, it appeared that an entire vehicle was filled up with maces gifted her. “I was so broken-hearted, I barely had the spirit to step into the airport,” Vinesh would tell a family member afterwards. “Then I wanted the journey to never end.” Even before she reached her district, six hours into her welcome, she was saying that these honours were greater than a thousand Olympic medals.

For the function in Balali, organised by a set of khaps in the area, the shamianas and seating were in place on the mandir premises well before sundown, the two cobras found in the grounds had been dealt with, and much of the food for 5,000 heads—methi bhajia, alu bonda, bread pakoda, boondi ladoo—was prepared. On the far side of the Hanuman temple, Balali’s new star Neha Sangwan was at practice in a wrestling hall, a poster up in the background celebrating her gold at the Asian cadet championship.

What was unfolding across Haryana was less a felicitation than a righting of an unfathomable wrong. “Listen to me,” a man with a shikha (tuft) told me, his eyes ablaze. “There has never been such a terrible incident in the history of the universe, and nor will there ever be.” A businessman who came from Dagroli, 10km away, recounted how his two daughters, in their early 20s, wept all of that day; nobody cooked, nobody ate. Neither luck nor rules could explain the events in Paris: it was at worst a conspiracy, at best a lack of support from the establishment. Yet, some straightforward logic: their girl had beaten the title-holder and world No.1, returned undefeated after all her bouts—she was, by all rights, the champion. What this unjust world could not deliver they would. They would give her gold.

On the too-loud sound system the newly minted praise songs blasted into the deep night. The beatsy Sapne Chhori Ke addressed the deceit. The portentous India Ka Bad Luck likened Vinesh to Jhansi ki Rani; and the energetic singer who took the stage at night, sometimes slapping her thigh pehelwan-style to the dhol, invoked Bhagat Singh. In her sangharsh, in the powers-that-be’s conspiracy against her valour, Vinesh had risen to folklore, to epic, shot into the cultural bloodstream of her people.

When she arrived at 10 minutes past midnight, making first for the temple, and then to the overcrowded stage, the honouring commenced—not in sarkari style with three dull speeches and a certificate from a tedious chief guest. A felicitation by the people, who had dutifully put down their names in a notebook for the chance to bless the daughter. Paramjit Malik of Jhajjar brought up 30kg of ghee he’d carried in 15kg tins slung over his shoulders as he walked a 50km pilgrimage. Men crowned her with pagris of glorious colour. They placed garlands of marigold or cash around her neck, ₹21,000 a popular figure. Neha Sangwan’s father brought her one such and Vinesh found the elegant solution of honouring Neha with it. Others offered ₹5,001, ₹500 or ₹100, such as Sanjay, the village chowkidar. She received a sword, maces, shawls, poems, songs, paintings, plaques, a photo collage, and, yes, a gold medal. Every elder pressed their hands down on her bowed head. The man with the shikha wagged a finger at her and told her not to give up wrestling and not to take up politics.

As her uncle, the famous Mahavir Phogat, took the mic at 1.15am—her 15th running hour of honours, straight off an eight-hour transcontinental flight—Vinesh’s head began to spin. She slid low into her seat, eyes fixed shut, looking for all the world like she’d lost consciousness. There was little anxiety in the gathering—Vinesh, they knew, bounces back.

Soon Bajrang would empty out a green and white sachet of Electral into a cold bottle of water, soon she would resume receiving blessings with a gracious smile till she saw out the queue, near 2am she would find the words for a lovely little speech, hoping that every home in this village produced a girl who would beat her records, beseeching the elders in the audience, which even here was 95% male, to “please support my sisters, they can achieve a great deal, they only need your help, your hopes, your belief”, soon thereafter tell the press that “the fight of life is very long” and remind them of the unfinished fight from last year —but for now, for these few minutes, she could afford to surrender to this dizzy fatigue under the bright lights on the full stage as if it were home. For Vinesh Phogat was home, and she was gold.

Tomorrow, another fight, another fight.

Rahul Bhattacharya is a novelist and journalist.

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