What’s the lesson to learn from the disqualification of Vinesh Phogat? That the patriarchy will always get the last laugh? It’s tempting to fall in that trap (I know I certainly did for a few hours after my favourite wrestler was disqualified), but in recent years, many of us have understood that though that is what the establishment may want you to believe, the reality is quite different — see the way Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump is unfolding in the US.
On and off the mat, Vinesh remains undefeated. Whether in the Paris Olympics against Yui Susaki, the world’s best wrestler in her weight category, a woman unused to failure, or when pitted against former Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, a man with so much political clout that a macho government shivered to hold him accountable for repeated sexual harassment, Vinesh has always been our winner.
For five years, Susaki had only been a champion, her international match record a pristine 82-0. While the Japanese wrestler spent all her time training for Paris, Phogat was in a desperate fight for justice. The patriarchy, represented here by the state and sporting officialdom, drove her and her fellow decorated wrestlers on the streets for 40 days. Her victory — and disqualification — felt deeply personal.
In 2021, I won a prolonged court battle against a former minister in the Narendra Modi government. This week, when Phogat started acing her matches, I felt like I had won again. That her success was vindication for everything this country puts its women through. Phogat and I share the same legal team, led by lawyer Rebecca John, but Phogat’s joy and grief is personal for many of us. The language women used to share how they felt after the news of Phogat’s disqualification broke was intimate — “painful”, “heartbreaking”, “angry”, “weepy”, “shattering”.
Phogat had the collective prayers and “you go girl” cheers of Indian women for whom sexual harassment is a daily reality. And their anger. She channelled this rage of women to barrel through to the final. I recognised the emotion from nearly 8,000 km away. After her disqualification, our feelings of pride in Phogat and anger against a system that didn’t care enough have only increased. More than ever, Vinesh is the hero we need.
Team doctor Dinshaw Pardiwala said the team tried “all possible drastic measures” from cutting her hair to shortening the length of her clothes. As the coaches and doctors explain why they couldn’t save our star athlete from disqualification, let’s remind ourselves that Phogat’s successes were despite the hurdles her country placed in front of her in the run-up to what is every athlete’s most important international tournament.
Her Paris story will forever be juxtaposed against the images of policewomen using force to drag her away as she screamed and struggled, the Indian flag lying on the floor forgotten. As she went from victory to victory, I couldn’t help but think that when Narendra Modi congratulated her, he should use the opportunity to apologise to Phogat and her colleagues for misusing the police and denying them justice. For all the public and private humiliation they have endured and for backing a politically powerful man over the ugly truth of women who are preyed upon in the workplace. Now that’s the real lost opportunity.
The same day Phogat won the semi-final against her Cuban opponent, her lawyers were in a Delhi courtroom. John said she had watched the wrestlers from the time they were protesting at Jantar Mantar. “I saw them beaten, bruised, conflicted,” she said. “Vinesh kept telling me this is the time I should use for practice. I haven’t practised for months.” Phogat had told John that she would be unavailable to record evidence until the Olympics was over.
In case you have forgotten the history of the man the Indian state has steadfastly supported, let me rejig your memory. The May court order framing charges in the ongoing case of six wrestlers against Singh detailed many instances of abuse by him including a number of times over a decade, both here and abroad, when the former WFI chief groped elite wrestlers’ breasts on the pretext of checking their breath. I say elite because imagine those who didn’t have the confidence or exposure of these elite athletes and who may not have yet spoken up. Singh’s lawyer essentially argued that what happens abroad stays abroad. The court said that didn’t hold because these acts were “executed under a ‘single criminal enterprise’ or ‘single impulse’ to sexually exploit and harass female wrestlers by abusing his dominant position. There was a clear ‘unity of purpose’ or ‘unity of thought’ behind the actions of accused no.1 [Singh] that is, to sexually exploit vulnerable female subordinates as much as possible”.
Meanwhile, Team Phogat is more united than ever before. “What Vinesh has done is beyond imagination,” Olympic medallist Sakshi Malik, who protested alongside Phogat, said. “If it was possible, I would have given my medal to Vinesh”. Juxtaposed against the state’s support for Singh were at least three spouses who stood by the women who spoke up and demonstrated first-hand a rarely seen, empathetic model of Indian masculinity. Hopefully, it will spread far and fast.
Whether it’s Juno Temple in the latest season of Fargo or wrestler Bajrang Punia’s admiring description of Phogat, tiger and lioness — or their Hindi equivalent, sherni, women who battle power and violence to emerge victorious are mostly described this way because it’s the men around them who are rubbing their eyes in disbelief after witnessing the power of their anger. As Soraya Chemaly and others have written, women are taught early in life to suppress our anger. “When a woman shows anger in institutional, political and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms,” Chemaly writes in Rage Becomes Her. “She is met with aversion, perceived as hostile, irritable, less competent and unlikeable.” Thankfully, female rage has been in vogue for a few years now.
The biggest lesson for me then is that Phogat went to the Olympics a hero — and will come back a bigger one. Let’s rage together with our sherni.
The writer is a Bengaluru-based writer and co-founder of India Love Project on Instagram
