Vinesh Phogat after winning the women’s freestyle 50kg round of 16 wrestling match against Japan’s Yui Susaki at the 2024 Summer Olympics, in Paris, France.
| Photo Credit: PTI
On August 15, the Indian Olympic Association expressed its disappointment after the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed wrestler Vinesh Phogat’s appeal for a shared silver at the Paris Olympics. Phogat was disqualified after she was found to be 100g overweight on the morning of her gold medal bout. A day after her disqualification, Phogat announced her retirement on social media. She wrote, “…I don’t have any more strength now. Goodbye Wrestling, 2001-2024.”
Last year, Phogat had been in the news worldwide for protesting with other wrestlers against the former president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI), Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, alleging that he sexually abused multiple women athletes for years. During their sit-in protests at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, the wrestlers were manhandled by the police.
Following her disqualification at the Paris Olympics, the current WFI chief Sanjay Singh, who is an aide to Brij Bhushan Singh, had the audacity to suggest that “India won six medals in Paris. Those six could have been in wrestling alone if it was not for the protests in the last 15-16 months.”
The rhetoric of ‘our daughters’
In India, the achievements of women, as well as the gruesome crimes against them, are milked for political gain. These women become “our daughters,” bringing “pride” or “shame”, bolstering or tarnishing the image of the state/community. This rhetoric invokes possession, control, kinship, and community that especially find resonance in Haryana. Many feminists may find this rhetoric de-humanising for justifiable reasons: it constructs women almost entirely vis-à-vis their relationships with others and deprives them of selfhood.
However, the protesting wrestlers have also demonstrated the ability to deploy this language to influence people. In April 2023, Phogat posted on X, “In honour of the country’s daughters, the entire nation will emerge in protest.” In a video in May 2023, she appealed to the elders of the State and members of khap panchayats who had shown their support for the protest by noting that the country’s daughters are sitting in the streets for the vindication of their constitutional rights. Recently, she was honoured by the Sarvkhap Panchayat in Rohtak and said, “The fight for our daughters’ honour has just begun.”
Phogat’s living legacy evidences her remarkable resilience and indomitable spirit, which shines even brighter when contrasted with the forms of power that she has been up against. She hails from Haryana, which exists in the urban Indian imagination as a violently patriarchal State where women are denied access to basic freedoms. However, mega sporting events such as the Olympics lay threadbare the profound contradictions of this State whose dismal gender demographics sit rather uncomfortably against its routine production and celebration of award-winning women athletes.
Translations on the ground
This success is affected by neoliberal dynamics where economic precarity is on the rise as agriculture becomes less profitable over time. An Olympic medal comes with the promise of international recognition and a prestigious government job.
Fieldwork in rural Haryana demonstrates that gender, caste, age, and class roles, which are defined by society, determine women’s mobility, making their access to masculine public spaces conditional on some compelling reason and requiring adherence to a behavioural code of conduct. In that sense, sporting success becomes a badge of honour, disciplining, and morality. It becomes a culturally sanctioned avenue for conditional, fragile, and temporary freedoms, which author Rupal Oza has written about. At the same time, sport and international recognition allow women access to role models who demonstrate the bodily strength, confidence, and presence which a vast majority of non-sporting women in Haryana are discouraged from exhibiting, by covering up or veiling. Against this context, the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of Phogat carry possibilities for a unique vernacularisation of feminism in Haryana. Vernacularisation is the process by which universalistic human rights are converted into local understandings of social justice. It has the advantage of fashioning change in communities from within.
Among the wrestlers who stayed put despite the use of force by the state to disrupt their protests were Phogat, Bajrang Punia (Olympic medallist wrestler), Sakshi Malik (Olympic medallist wrestler), Satyavrat Kadian (Malik’s husband and wrestler), Somvir Rathee (Phogat’s husband and wrestler), Sangeeta Phogat and Priyanka Phogat (Phogat’s sisters) and Rahul Yadav (wrestler). The men risked their careers to support their partners’ fight against sexual harassment. This is crucial for a State like Haryana whose men have been derided in popular culture as un-feminist. It reveals that cultures and communities are neither static nor homogenous. They should not be demonised or uncritically accepted in a wholesale fashion.
Phogat’s story resists the temptation to essentialise both the men and women of Haryana. In a post on X on August 16, she emotionally expressed her husband’s sacrifices, mother’s courage, and father’s aspirations. “My father, an ordinary bus driver, would tell me that one day he would see his daughter high in a plane while he would drive on the road below,” she wrote. These stories open up space not just for the women of Haryana to imagine a differently constructed future, but also for the men to embody gentler and kinder forms of masculinity.
Anupriya Dhonchak hails from Haryana, and is a lawyer and Rhodes scholar, with a BCL and an MPhil in Law from the University of Oxford.
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