At Olympics, India’s top women wrestlers have more at stake than medals | Paris Olympics 2024

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.

They were led by three elite athletes – Vinesh Phogat, considered India’s most successful woman wrestler with three consecutive gold medals at the Commonwealth Games; Bajrang Punia, a bronze medallist at the Tokyo Olympics 2020; and Sakshi Malik, the first Indian female wrestler to win an Olympic medal, in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. They also demanded that the WFI be disbanded and that fresh elections be held to free the federation from Singh’s acolytes – and so, from his influence.

The wrestlers, most of whom were from Haryana, wept in public as they recounted how Singh had, during his 12-year tenure as the WFI chief, allegedly created and encouraged a culture of brazen sexual abuse.

“We fear for our lives. If he [Singh] is not sacked, then the careers of all the young wrestlers who joined the dharna [protest] will be over,” the wrestlers wrote in their letter to the Indian Olympic Association. Vinesh Phogat spoke of receiving “death threats” from WFI officials.

The shocking stories of serial sexual harassment in women’s wrestling – a sport that has consistently boosted India’s medal tally at international tournaments and the Olympics – made headlines across the world. At home, they embarrassed the BJP and PM Modi who had celebrated the wrestlers’ Olympic medals.

Singh denied the charges. “Even if one wrestler comes forward and proves she has been sexually harassed, I will hang myself,” he said.

Three months later seven female wrestlers, including a minor, filed police complaints of sexual harassment, molesting, stalking and criminal intimidation against Singh. Among them was the woman whose guardian was talking to me in the SUV.

A year later, he says, the decision to file a case against Singh feels like an act of “bewakoofi [stupidity]”.

Instead of justice, the complainants and their supporters faced more intimidation, multiple wrestlers and coaches told Al Jazeera. Today, they routinely get threatening calls or offers of large sums of money to dissuade complainants and witnesses from testifying against Singh in court. Wrestling academies are warned against allowing these wrestlers to train.

The child victim has already withdrawn her complaint. Those who continue to take on Singh say they fear that the National Anti-Doping Agency (Nada) will be used to destroy their reputation and careers. Turning back to look at the road to see if someone had followed him, the man in the SUV recalled an anonymous phone call he received last winter.

“The caller said that if the complainant doesn’t back off, ‘Dope mein phasa denge’ [We’ll frame her in a doping case],” he said.

Soon after, Nada officials arrived at the residential wrestling academy where the complainant stays and practises. “We have received orders from the top to conduct your dope test. If you don’t give [blood and urine] samples, Nada will ban you,” they told her, according to a friend of the female wrestler. Her guardian corroborated this account.

A few days later she received a notice from Nada. Traces of a banned substance had been found in her samples.

‘A bad reputation’

Wrestling is arguably India’s most successful Olympic sport today and Haryana is the crucible that churns out the country’s champions.

Of the 21 individual Olympic medals across sports that India has won in 76 years since its independence, six belong to wrestlers from Haryana.

The agrarian state that shares its border with Delhi lives mostly in its villages. It is a deeply patriarchal, conservative society, but also one where, in the late 1990s, young girls grabbed the chance they got to step out of their homes and show their mettle in local tournaments and, eventually, world championships.

For the Paris Olympics, five women wrestlers – Vinesh Phogat (50kg), Antim Panghal (53kg), Anshu Malik (57kg), Nisha Dahiya (68kg) and Reetika Hooda (76kg) – have qualified from India to compete. All are from Haryana. The wrestling competition begins on August 5.

Yet even as these women carry the hopes of a nation of 1.4 billion people at the world’s greatest sporting extravaganza, fear, more than joy, is palpable in Haryana’s wrestling community – from the man in the SUV to the training schools where champions are sculpted.

A year and a half after the protests, Singh is now on trial for sexual harassment and is no longer a politician or the chief of WFI. In January last year, the sports ministry had asked Singh to “step aside” as WFI chief so that the allegations against him could be investigated.

But his close ties to the BJP’s top leaders remain intact, and he has placed his confidants in key positions in the WFI, allowing him to run the federation by proxy, wrestlers and coaches told Al Jazeera.

All this has had a chilling effect on the talent pool in Haryana which, according to a coach, had about 5,000 female wrestlers as recently as 2022.

Before the protests, several coaches told Al Jazeera that most wrestling academies in Haryana would get 20-40 new students every year. Wearing track pants, hair clips and ponytails, young girls would arrive riding pillion on their fathers’ scooters and motorbikes. After checking their fitness level, the coaches would test their intent – the hair had to go, cropped to a boyish buzz cut. Most girls would wince, weep even, but would return, finding a sterner self in that first sacrifice.

But now, says Amarjeet Nehra, who runs a wrestling academy in Rohtak, parents are reluctant to put their daughters in a game that’s acquired a “bad reputation”. “They are scared [that] their girls will be sexually abused,” he said. Rohtak has more than a dozen wrestling academies and there’s been a drop in attendance at all. “Earlier, if there were 50 new admissions, now there are 25,” he said. And many girls who had been training for years have quit wrestling.

Al Jazeera sent detailed questions to Singh seeking his response on the specific allegations levelled against him by wrestlers, their coaches, families and others in the wrestling community, involving sexual harassment and intimidation – including through the alleged use of Nada to pressure complainants into silence. We received no response. Al Jazeera also sent several requests to Singh for an interview but received no response.

The man in the SUV was clear that the complainants would not withdraw the case against Singh. “But I will never put my daughter in wrestling [because] Brij Bhushan and his men are everywhere,” he said. “If things stay like this, wrestling in Haryana will be destroyed,” he added.

Without Haryana’s wrestlers, India’s bag of medals at the Olympics could once again look like it did two decades ago – almost empty.

Singh’s men ‘will murder you’

Singh, 67, is a bearded, brawny civil contractor-turned-politician, who has boasted about murder.

Two years ago, Singh, during an interview with a digital news portal in his hometown Gonda, explained on camera in detail how he shot a man. No action was taken against him.

Singh, in fact, has faced more than 30 criminal cases on charges ranging from dacoity (armed robbery) and kidnapping, to rioting and murder. In 1996, Singh was jailed for harbouring associates of Dawood Ibrahim, a Mumbai-based underworld don whom India has designated a “terrorist” for masterminding the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts in which more than 250 people were killed.

Singh has not been convicted in any case, either due to lack of evidence or “witnesses turning hostile”.

Despite all of these cases, Singh has had a long political career since he joined the BJP’s Hindu nationalist movement as it surged in the early 1990s, following the demolition of a mosque in his home state of Uttar Pradesh. Singh is a six-time MP from Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state that accounts for 80 parliamentary seats. Of these, he is believed to hold sway over up to eight seats.

In 2012, Singh expanded his empire of influence from politics to sport, when he took charge of the WFI as its president. One of the first major decisions he took was to move the women’s national training camp from Haryana, where they had been training with men for years, to Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. Indiscipline was given as the reason for the shift, though there was no explanation why the women, and not the men, were moved to a city where he had a house – a bungalow that has featured often in victim’s statements.

Ajay Danda, who runs a well-known men’s wrestling academy in Haryana’s Mirchpur village, paints a disturbing picture of how some WFI officials and a few older women wrestlers would operate at the Lucknow centre to “break the girls”.

“It was teamwork and they did it slowly, weaving a web while he [Singh] remained in the background,” Danda claimed to Al Jazeera.

They would target girls from “totally garib [poor] families,” by promising them special privileges, facilities and participation in international tournaments. Or they would declare the wrestlers unfit, injured, and ask them to leave the camp.

“They would make the girls emotional, and then, to make them plead their case, they would be taken to meet Netaji (as Brij Bhushan is often called),” Danda said. “In the Under-15 category, girls start playing from the age of 13. What do they know?”

As wrestlers progress from district and state levels to compete at the national, and then international level, they are admitted to the training camp that provides a level playing field with common facilities and coaching. These camps can run up to a few months and players who are excluded from the camp or suspended by the WFI can’t compete nationally or internationally.

Paramjeet Malik, a physiotherapist at the Lucknow camp in 2014, said that he witnessed young wrestlers being taken to Singh’s house in a car at night. After some of them confided in him, he informed senior coaches and an official at the Lucknow camp, and called a mini news conference where he alleged that the wrestlers were being manipulated and sexually exploited.

That same night, Malik was asked to leave the camp along with his wife, Suman Kundu, a wrestler who was training for Olympic trials. “They said, ‘Leave now, or else there will be mayhem. They [Singh’s men] will murder you’,” Malik, who is tall, muscular and looks freakishly fit, said.

He left the camp that day. Nearly a decade later, Malik’s unheeded warning about the dark and dirty underbelly of Indian wrestling would return to haunt the country.

The trailblazers

About 170km (105 miles) from Delhi, in Haryana’s sleepy Sasai village, women, their faces veiled with thin scarves, balance bales of hay on their heads and walk past a small pond where buffaloes are ambling in for a cooling dip.

Next door is the residential Altius Wrestling Academy. Set up by Usha Sihag, India’s first woman wrestling coach, and her husband Sanjay Sihag, the academy lies at the end of a large plot of land that houses a school.

Split into two, on the left is a long wrestling hall. Constructed like a modern industrial shed, it has a square blue mat – 12 by 12 metres – and some gym equipment around it.

Running parallel to it, across a muddy patch of land with shrubs, is a row of rooms bookended by a kitchen and dining area in the front, and bathrooms at the other. In these seven hostel rooms with mesh doors and folding beds stacked together, idols of Hindu gods rest on top of steel almirahs, medals hang from nails in walls and alarm clocks are set at 4am.

Monday to Saturday, at 5am, the wrestlers begin their routine with a jog around the playground. Under the moody blue sky, they look like silent shadows bobbing up and down.

“It’s endurance one day, strength training another, and some days they play a game,” says Naveen, 28. A petite former wrestler in running shorts, her long hair tied in a top knot and a whistle around her neck, she conducts the morning workout sessions and is the hostel warden.

Altius – taken from the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) – is a girls-only academy, but “Coach Saab”, as Sanjay is called, recently gave in to parents’ requests to take in the younger brothers of girls who had been admitted. Its 28 aspiring wrestlers, from ages 7 to 19, are a mix of cute boys with long eyelashes and pink lips; muscular, butch girls with crewcuts; and Lakshita, 11.

Unlike others, Lakshita is not in sports gear. Her black sweatshirt is embellished with shiny, big pearls, and in front are two furry, pink swans facing each other, forming a heart. She saunters in a different direction from others, and sometimes she leans on a pillar to watch.

“She is special, but very bright,” says Sanjay, 47, who arrives at the academy in the evenings, after his day job in Haryana’s education department, to conduct wrestling practice.

Clean shaven, with traces of grey in his hair, Sanjay is stern on the mat, but affectionate off it, with a ready smile. Parents of his students refer to him as “Bhagwan” (God) – in deference to a teacher, but also because they are grateful that he never pesters them when fees are delayed.

“Since all her siblings are here, Lakshita’s parents didn’t want her to be alone at home. She won’t become a player,” he says. “But she participates in the morning exercises, the evening mat practice, and is learning life skills.”

Most wrestling academies in Haryana, especially those for women, are safe, familial spaces where parents leave their young daughters and sons in the care of coaches they trust. Until January last year, many parents believed that the broader wrestling universe, too, was an extension of these cosy, neighbourly spaces.

“Sport is the 37th caste in Haryana,” says Sanjay, referring to the state’s 36 caste-based clans that follow a common patriarchal code and share their love for kushti, as wrestling is known in these parts.

Dangals (wrestling tournaments held in villages) have been a part of the state’s culture for ages. Most villages have an akhara – traditional wrestling academies with boarding, lodging and mud pits – that, until the late 1990s, were men-only spaces where burly wrestlers in loincloths prayed to the celibate Hindu god Hanuman, slapped their oiled thighs and vied for titles like Rustam-e-Hind and Hind Kesari.

The first father-daughter team to knock on this male bastion was Master Chandgi Ram, a wrestling legend and coach, who started training his two daughters in 1997 and taking them to dangals.

His student, Mahavir Phogat, carried on the tradition by training his four daughters and two nieces. In 2010, six years after women’s wrestling made its Olympic debut in Athens in 2004, Mahavir’s eldest daughter, Geeta, became the first Indian female wrestler to qualify for the Olympics.

In a state where girls, considered a lifelong liability, were often eliminated in the womb, and those who were born were at times christened Kafi (enough), Maafi (forgive) or Batheri (too much), attitudes began to change.

But the year that really catapulted women’s wrestling into the nation’s consciousness and changed the relationship of Haryana’s men with their daughters was 2016.

That year, Sakshi Malik, the daughter of a bus conductor, became India’s first female wrestler to win an Olympic medal at Rio de Janeiro. Four months later, Dangal, a film about Mahavir and his wrestling daughters, starring superstar Aamir Khan, became the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever. The Phogat sisters became famous, women wrestlers became national icons and were being celebrated – honoured with cash prizes and high-profile jobs.

“Parents would watch Dangal at night, dream that their daughters will become Geeta and Babita (another one of Mahavir’s daughters), and would come here in the morning,” Sanjay said.

Then, in January last year, stories of sexual abuse by Singh barrelled through the villages, homes and wrestling academies of Haryana, leaving a trail of anger, confusion and fear in their wake.

But there was also hope. World champions, Olympians, were on the streets protesting. Surely, many thought, the government would step in and clean up the WFI.

A fiefdom of fear

Last year, as Delhi shivered in its coldest January in more than a decade, wrestlers braved the chill and sat huddled together in puffer jackets and thick sweaters on thin mattresses on a pavement. One of them was Anshu Malik, 22, a rising star on the international wrestling circuit.

On the second day of the protest, Malik, a formidable grappler in the 57kg weight category, took the mic to share how Singh would often behave during international tours. Wearing an olive green sweatshirt over blue-and-white printed slacks, she stood next to Punia and said Singh, in a brazen violation of rules, would not only stay in the same hotel as women wrestlers, but would “take an adjacent room and keep his door open”.

Singh had a reputation of lifting the shirts of women wrestlers in public and groping them on the pretext of checking their breathing. His constant presence around their rooms during tournaments was creepy, stifling and threw them off their game, Malik said.

“If players are uncomfortable in their own rooms, how will they compete?” she asked, her voice earnest and resolute.

During his tenure as WFI president, Singh, riding on the success of wrestlers from Haryana, raised the federation’s profile. He improved facilities, streamlined the annual tournament calendar, increased the number of competitions and introduced open ranking tournaments that allowed wrestlers from across the country to compete with the best in their weight category. He also used his political clout to bring in corporate sponsors to give out prizes, cash awards and even stipends to wrestlers. His supporters say that he brought in discipline and put a check on top wrestlers misusing privileges.

But he also ran WFI like his personal fiefdom, say his critics. Apart from holding the post of WFI president, Singh was the chair of the WFI’s grievance redressal committee, which meant that all sexual harassment complaints would land at his desk. He also headed WFI’s selection committee, which recommended the wrestlers who would represent the country in international tournaments, and so held power over careers. Singh was also the president of Uttar Pradesh’s wrestling association.

Unlike tennis and other sports where athletes can compete as individuals in tournaments, in international wrestling tournaments, grapplers can only compete as part of a national team.

“He kept the referees under his control. So scared were they that whatever he would say, they would repeat like parrots and give the decisions that he wanted,” Geeta Phogat told Al Jazeera last year.

“Those who kowtowed to him, he would give them facilities, send them on foreign tours, make them coaches, physiotherapists. There were so many things we tolerated, so many things we saw, but kept quiet,” she said, because of the fear that he would destroy their careers.

In 2023, WFI elections were due. Singh, who had hit the three-term limit as president, was no longer eligible. But in his 12 years as president, he had placed family members and loyalists in key positions in the WFI and the 20-plus state wrestling associations.

The wrestlers feared he would get them elected so he could continue to run the WFI by proxy. If his reign continued, they worried, so, too, would the sexual abuse.

The January protest ended after three days, following assurances from the government that justice would be done. Singh was asked to step down and committees were appointed to inquire into the wrestlers’ allegations and to run the WFI in the interim.

The wrestlers were deposed and the inquiry report was submitted, but its findings were not made public. The government remained silent on Singh and charges of sexual harassment.

Instead, WFI elections were announced.

Singh looked all set to regain control of WFI, so the wrestlers returned to the streets in April, this time for a much longer and challenging haul. That’s when seven wrestlers, including a minor, filed police complaints against Singh, and began their sit-in protest in peak summer on a pavement in the heart of Delhi’s busy Connaught Place, next to Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory.

They demanded Singh’s arrest based on their complaints, but the police registered a First Information Report – the first step towards an investigation – only after it was directed by the Supreme Court to do so.

The administration and the police, which were passive earlier, turned openly hostile throughout the 46 days when the country’s top athletes lived, ate and slept on the pavement.

On their left, at a distance of about 2km (1.2 miles), was the parliament. If the protesting wrestlers walked for two minutes to their right, they’d reach the gates of Singh’s official bungalow, which was also the WFI’s office then, the site of several instances of sexual abuse.

But the wrestlers were hemmed in on both sides by barricades, checkpoints with metal detectors and a strong police force, so they turned their small patch of footpath into a lively theatre of dissent. Posters with photos of Singh standing behind bars and white plex sheets with details of his criminal cases dangled from trees.

A tarp over the protest site offered shade, and two tall pedestal fans whirred on either side of their shanty. Electricity to the protest site would be cut off often. So at night, triangular mosquito nets would pop up, and wrestlers would huddle inside them.

About two weeks into the protest, when Haryana’s farmers tried to join the wrestler’s protest, barricades were set up by Delhi Police at the capital’s border to stop them.

On May 28 last year, when the wrestlers tried to march to the new parliament building on its inauguration day, to register their objection to Singh’s presence at the ceremony as a sitting MP, they were manhandled and dragged across the streets by the police.

When the wrestlers still refused to budge despite all this, a chorus of lesser-known wrestlers rose in defence of Singh. They called the protest a coup of sorts, an attempt by senior players whose careers were over to take over the WFI. They claimed that the allegations against Singh were “fake” because they had themselves not seen or suffered sexual abuse.

“The day Brij Bhushan does not have the backing of the government at the centre, many more girls will come forward and complain about him,” Vinesh Phogat said.

On June 7, after assurances from the then sports minister, Anurag Thakur, that a charge sheet against Singh would be filed soon, and that neither Singh’s family members nor his associates would be allowed to contest the WFI elections, the wrestlers called off their protest.

But the next day, the father of the child wrestler said the complaint his daughter had filed against Singh was false. Two months later, an obscene 30-second clip with Anshu Malik’s morphed photo went viral. Police arrested a man and claimed that he had created the clip to increase his followers, but Vinesh and Sakshi accused Singh’s team of being behind the video.

Yet again, after smelling victory, India’s champion wrestlers were being tested afresh. But their sport and background had trained them well.

Sweat and sacrifice

“Eighty percent of the wrestlers are from poor families. No kid from a rich family will subject themselves to this kind of torture,” said Sanjay Sihag of Altius Wrestling Academy as he watched one of his students, Pinky, winded and with tears rolling down her cheeks, crawl off the mat’s red zone – a circle, nine metres in diameter, that demarcates the wrestling arena – on her elbows.

In wrestling bouts – two rounds of three minutes each, with a 30-second break in between – points are won by throwing the opponent, locking them in a grip, or takedowns. Knee, elbow and shoulder injuries are common.

To be fighting fit, wrestlers at Altius follow a back-breaking daily routine of physical training and mat practice, supplemented by a protein-rich, nutritious diet. All hostel rooms have large sacks of California almonds, crates of sweet lemon, mortars and pestles, strange juicer contraptions and massage oil bottles.

Though there’s an abundance of fresh milk, curd and butter, hostel meals are simple and strictly vegetarian except for eggs in the morning. All lentils and vegetables are free of red chilli powder and traditional Indian spices for easy digestion, and taste a little bland, like baby-food.

Yet, in a state with a per capita monthly income of about 25,000 Indian rupees ($298), the monthly average expense that parents need to shell out on a wrestler at Altius is in excess of 20,000 rupees ($215). That includes the academy’s fee of 8,000 rupees, and the cost of wrestlers’ special diet and kit (at least 10,000 rupees).

Many fathers and mothers in Haryana struggle and cut other expenses to put their kids through wrestling academies. Some sell patches of their farmland, move to cities like Rohtak and live in rented homes just so their daughters can have a shot at wrestling glory.

That’s why, Sanjay said, the first priority for all wrestlers is to get a job. “Once that is secure, then they play for fame, glory.”

The federal and state governments, Indian Railways, the armed forces and police services offer jobs to exceptional sportspersons. The bigger the game and the medal, the better the job and the pay. Companies, too, offer sponsorships to young wrestlers.

Swati, 18, a rising star at Altius who is chasing a gold medal in nationals, recently bagged one. Every month, 12,000 rupees now land directly in her bank account, a big relief for her parents, both of whom are teachers and have physical disabilities.

This economic independence is precious for Haryana’s women wrestlers. Most, including Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik, have married fellow wrestlers they fell in love with, a privilege in a community where “honour killings” of girls who stray into forbidden love with men from other castes, or even their own village, are common.

Lying on her bed at Altius, a pink towel wrapped around her neck, Tanu Sharma, 18, laughed as she recalled a girl at her women-only college who asked her recently: “Brother, are you a boy or a girl?”

Tall and lanky, Tanu doesn’t care. She wears only shorts or trousers and dreams of the day when she will drive her own car, wearing dark glasses, speakers blasting out music.

Like most wrestlers, she, too, is working towards winning an international medal that will guarantee her the job of a deputy superintendent of police – a position of power, swag and official cars with beacon lights.

“This life is so much better,” she said. “I can marry, have a family. But they [girls who aren’t seeking a sports career] can never play like me, or live the life I am living. Your whole life changes with wrestling. You earn money, you are not dependent on anyone.”

‘We are ants’

To free the WFI from Singh’s clutches, the wrestlers fielded their own ticket – led by a veteran female grappler – for the elections to the wrestling federation, when they were finally held last December.

But Singh’s panel won 13 of the 15 posts. Sanjay Singh, an old associate from Uttar Pradesh who called Singh his “elder brother” and had held several positions at WFI over the years, all of them subordinate to Singh, was elected WFI’s new president. The same day he announced that national competitions for the Under 15 and Under 20 categories would be held in Singh’s hometown, Gonda.

A year after winning a Commonwealth Games gold, and seven years after her bronze medal at the Rio Olympics that changed the face of Indian women’s wrestling, 31-year-old Sakhi Malik could take it no more.

Seated next to Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia at a hastily called press conference, Malik burst into tears as she placed her blue mat shoes on the table and announced that she was quitting wrestling. A champion who the nation had long seen with her arms raised in victory, a big smile on her face, was broken.

“People felt that if the country’s top wrestlers can be treated like this, if they can’t get justice, if this is the plight of women who won medals, what will happen if their daughters are sexually harassed,” the man in the SUV said.

“If I am a parent, who will I fight? It’s best that I tell my kids to drop kushti.”

Opposition political parties, which had supported the wrestlers’ protest, tore into the BJP. “These tears are the gift of Modi government … today or tomorrow, every drop of tear shed by the wrestlers will be accounted for,” the Congress party said on its official X handle while sharing the video of Malik crying.

Three days later, an under-pressure sports ministry suspended the WFI, acknowledging that “former office bearers” were still in control despite the elections. But United World Wrestling (UWW), wrestling’s global governing body, threw its support behind the newly elected body and the WFI challenged the government’s suspension order in court. The WFI is functioning and the case is continuing.

Sanjay Singh and UWW have not responded to questions sent by Al Jazeera, on the alleged influence that Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh still wields within the WFI.

“Brij Bhushan is out of control. If they [BJP] can’t control him, who are we? We have no aukat (status). We are ants,” the man in the SUV said, as his mind drifted back to last October, when his ward received a notice from Nada.

The notice claimed that traces of a banned substance – clenbuterol, that is injected in cattle, lamb and poultry to increase meat yield – had been found in her samples.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), to whom Nada reports, has set 5 mg/ml as the threshold level for clenbuterol to be investigated for potential meat contamination. After three rounds of dope tests, the concentration of clenbuterol in the complainant’s samples ranged between 0.09 and 0.36 mg/ml.

“I met with Nada’s director-general and he told me, ‘You are not positive,’” the man in the SUV said. A delegation of Haryana’s wrestling coaches met Anurag Thakur, the then-sports minister, and brought up the complainant’s alleged harassment by Nada, yet the notice was not withdrawn.

Al Jazeera sought an interview with India’s sports secretary in May and then followed up by emailing questions. There has been no response.

The complainant, who is in her 20s, has won several medals at the national and international level. A few months before Nada’s notice, she had signed a three-year sponsorship deal with Reliance Foundation Youth Sports, one of India’s biggest sports promotion programmes that took care of, among other things, her training, wrestling kit, physiotherapy, protein supplement, diet and dietician. The sponsorship deal was cancelled soon after Nada’s notice. Another girl in the academy also lost her sponsorship with the foundation, even though she was not tested by Nada, Al Jazeera has confirmed.

In May this year, seven months after the notice, Nada issued what the guardian calls, “a clean chit” to the wrestler who had complained against Singh. But it was too late: With the sponsorship deal gone, she had lost the funding support she needed to improve her fitness levels, train abroad, participate in international tournaments and improve her ranking before this year’s Olympic trials.

Al Jazeera sent detailed questions to Reliance Foundation Youth Sports on the wrestler’s case on May 21, but has not received any response.

Al Jazeera also reached out to the director-general of Nada and followed it up with phone calls. It received no response.

As part of the sponsorship deal, the complainant used to receive a small monthly stipend that took care of her daily expenses. Now, even for small expenses, she is dependent on cash awards at tournaments that can take months, even years, to come.

“They are trying their best to break the girls,” the guardian said. “She is demoralised, but playing.”

‘A 50 percent drop in Haryana’s wrestling academies’

About 45 minutes’ drive from the stadium in Rohtak where the SUV was parked is coach Virender Dalal’s residential wrestling academy for girls in Haryana’s Chhara village.

Esha, 18, sat quietly on a canary yellow wrestling mat next to six other wrestlers who are talking and laughing.

Esha’s skin is tanned, teeth are sparkling white, and like the others, she was in the attire wrestlers wear when resting – a loose T-shirt and track pants. But unlike them, she was letting her hair grow and wears a headband to push back stray strands.

On a plot abutting his farmland, Virender’s academy is part of a zigzag maze of rooms. He lives there with his wife, two daughters, three buffaloes and a handful of wrestling students. Some are from his village, some are from other states.

Virender smiled as he recalled fathers bringing their young daughters to his wrestling academy. But several beds in his hostel rooms are now unoccupied. “Lots of parents have made their daughters quit wrestling after protests and inaction over Brij Bhushan. And those who have quit are not even studying. They are mostly just doing household work,” he said.

Esha lives with her family next door to Virender’s academy. Her family owns a small patch of farmland where they grow pearl millet and wheat. They also make some money from selling milk. It’s not enough. But earlier, when their heart was in wrestling, her parents somehow managed. Now priorities have changed.

“We had put Esha in wrestling, thinking she would become independent and stand on her own two feet,” her mother, Mamata, told Al Jazeera. “But when I saw this Brij Bhushan protest on TV, I got scared. If she goes for competitions, this can happen to her as well.”

Esha’s father can’t accompany her to competitions, and Mamata is often laid up in bed because of her slipped disk. “If this Brij Bhushan issue had not happened, we would have made her continue, at least till she got a job,” said Mamata.

Esha quit wrestling last year and is now waiting to get married in a twin wedding ceremony along with her elder sister because that is cost effective.

Like Esha, Sheetal Dalal had been training at Virender’s academy – for more than five years. A year before the protest, the 19-year-old won a silver medal in a national tournament. But last year, on her parents’ insistence, she quit wrestling and now sells soap, shampoo, mosquito repellent coils and hair oil at a shop nearby.

“The BJP and Brij Bhushan have destroyed the charm of wrestling in Haryana,” said Virender.

Of the 14 wrestling coaches Al Jazeera spoke with, nine said that there has been a significant drop in the numbers of girls in wrestling academies. Some put it at 20-30 percent, while others said it’s much more.

“There’s been almost a 50 per cent drop in the numbers at Haryana’s wrestling academies,” Shokinder Tomar, the national coach of Indian Railways’ women’s wrestling team, told Al Jazeera. “Parents are hesitant now. They are scared to put their kids in wrestling because they fear that their daughters will be sexually abused,” he said.

That terror lingers, even though Malik, Phogat and their sisterhood of senior wrestlers have won some key battles in recent months.

‘I’m now like a stray bull who can take on anybody’

The women’s training camp has been moved out of Lucknow. And it is now mandatory for a female coach to accompany girls during tournaments.

But confidants of Singh, say wrestlers and coaches, still control key positions within the body, including on the internal complaints committee for sexual harassment. The Haryana Wrestling Association, which was until last year relatively free of Singh’s influence, is now headed by Ramesh Bohar, Singh’s close aide, who has faced several criminal cases.

In India’s recently held national elections, the BJP dropped Singh as a candidate, but fielded his son from the same constituency. “I have neither aged nor have I retired. I’m now like a ‘chutta sand’ (stray bull) who can take on anybody,” Singh said while campaigning.

His son, Karan Bhushan Singh, is now a member of parliament and the president of the Uttar Pradesh Wrestling Association.

In May this year, a court in New Delhi, while framing charges against Singh in the sexual harassment case, noted that there was a clear “unity of purpose” behind Singh’s actions to “sexually exploit vulnerable female subordinates as much as possible”. The court noted that it had found sufficient material in the police’s charge sheet against Singh to frame charges and begin the trial.

It was a moment of victory for the protesting wrestlers. “Our name had been tainted and no one believed us. But the court vindicated us when it said that there is proof of sexual harassment,” a wrestler involved in the case said.

But two days later, he said, one of their supporters “who is not even a wrestler” got a threatening call from an unknown number.

A wrestling coach in Rohtak, who trains one of the complainants, told Al Jazeera that Singh’s men have been calling the parents of his students and telling them to withdraw their kids from his academy or risk getting them entangled in a dope case.

“I had 50 girls and about 10 boys in my wrestling academy. Now my strength is down to 37-38,” he said.

He worries that with the court case on, harassment will increase. “Witnesses will disappear or turn hostile,” he said.

One complainant agreed to talk to Al Jazeera about the case and the intimidation she was facing. But after exchanging messages for several days and saying that she was trying to muster courage, she finally texted, “Sorry, it’s become really very difficult. I’m just not able to talk … [His] people and the BJP have spoiled everything. Now whatever I have to say, I will say in court.”

But for now, there’s a more immediate challenge at hand – the world’s biggest sporting stage awaits.

A heart that beats at 190 bpm for Olympic glory

Vinesh Phogat, 29, a feisty, five-feet-two-inch (157cm) wrestler has a smile that can light up a stadium. She also has many firsts to her credit, and a stock of gold, silver and bronze medals won everywhere from Birmingham to Bishkek, Glasgow to the Gold Coast.

But the thing she has worked the hardest for, and come close to achieving – first in Rio, 2016, and then at the Tokyo Olympics, 2020 – has eluded her so far. At the Paris Olympics, she will get her third, and perhaps last, chance to win an Olympic medal.

Of the three wrestlers who led the protest last year, Phogat was the most vocal. Every time she accused Singh of sexually abusing wrestlers, she knew it was potentially career suicide. But for her, the fight was personal.

Her little niece had started tumbling on the wrestling mat, and Vinesh could no longer bear to imagine the future she would face if Singh’s influence over Indian wrestling continues.

“She is ziddi (obstinate) and doesn’t get scared. Once she decides something, she doesn’t think much. She just does it,” Somveer Rathi, her husband and a wrestler, said of Vinesh. In 2018, when they got married, in addition to the traditional seven vows mandated by Hindu rituals, they took an extra vow: “Beti bachao, beti padhao, beti khilao [Save daughters, teach daughters and let them play].”

Vinesh is among the seven complainants who have accused Singh of sexual harassment.

In August last year, two months after the protest ended, Vinesh resumed her practice sessions with an eye on the Olympic qualifiers.

But during a training session, she injured the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) – that passes through the knee joint and connects the thigh and the shinbone – on her left knee.

The last time she had suffered an ACL tear, it was in 2016, at the Rio Olympics. She was one of India’s top medal contenders, but during a quarterfinal bout, China’s San Yanan pinned her down in an uncomfortable hold and Vinesh had to be carried out on a stretcher, screaming and writhing in pain.

After injuring her ACL in August, she underwent a knee surgery at Mumbai’s Kokilaben Hospital. She was on pain medication and was still recuperating when Nada officials arrived at the hospital to take her samples for a dope test.

“Aren’t you ashamed?” an enraged family member rushed downstairs to tell them off. The officials left and did not return.

ACL recovery is slow, painful and can take up to six months. It begins with learning to walk again.

With Vinesh, there was also the lingering fear of a concussion she suffered in 2017 flaring up again, like it did at the Tokyo Olympics. Every time something hit her head, things would become blurry and her hearing would distort.

In December, when she began her recovery training, with the South African strength and conditioning specialist Wayne Lombard, the pain was unbearable. She collapsed and wept.

But in three months, the “ziddi” Vinesh was ready to resume mat training.

“Earlier, when she would train for tournaments, akhadas [wrestling academies] would happily send their wrestlers because it helped them as well. But this time Brij Bhushan’s men had threatened that if any girl helps her, becomes her sparring partner, they will destroy their career and finish any akhara that sends girls to train with Vinesh,” a wrestler close to her told Al Jazeera.

“But giving up doesn’t cross her mind,” he said. So Vinesh wrestled and trained with boys.

In April this year she qualified for the Olympics, and in July she won gold at Spain’s Grand Prix wrestling tournament.

Haryana has the dubious distinction of having the highest rate of crime against women in India and the country’s lowest gender ratio – 879 females for every 1,000 males. But often forgotten in the shocking, gory stories of female foeticide and honour killings is the stubbornness of Haryana’s women, their refusal to give up.

It was visible in the late 1990s, when young girls in singlets stood around mud pits in villages, ignoring abuses and insults, itching to fight for a life beyond marriage and domesticity. It’s in play every time a woman in Haryana defies the diktats of khaps – caste-based village councils – and marries the man she loves. It’s also visible on Vinesh’s face these days.

Phogat is competing in the 50kg category and will be up against, among others, Japan’s Yui Susaki, 25, the defending champion and a daunting legend who has never lost an international match.

Her regimen these days is to focus on speed and wrestling techniques with an eye on her opponents’ strengths and weak points.

She has shut out all distractions. Those days spent on the pavement and being dragged by the police on the streets are in the past. The national awards she returned in protest against WFI’s allegedly rigged elections are now a fading memory.

But sometimes Singh’s taunt after her loss at the Tokyo Olympics, when he called her “khota sikka” (counterfeit coin), rankles.

Vinesh lets it stay, lets the rage build up. Then, her teeth press down on her folded lips, her head tilts and her eyes narrow, fixed on the ground in front. She sprints and does manic push-ups, increasing her speed and keeping her heart rate above 190bpm, the rate at which her heart beats during big-game bouts.

She has an Olympic medal to win, and the wrestling dreams of Haryana’s young girls to save.