Forget Narendra Modi’s tawdry inauguration of the new parliament building. The images which speak the loudest about what has become of our republic came today from Jantar Mantar, where Delhi Police constables brutally pinned down India’s champion women wrestlers before whisking them away. Acting on orders from above, the police forcibly disbanded their month-long protest against the BJP MP whom they accuse of sexual harassment and molestation. Women activists and others from Delhi and neighbouring Haryana who were coming to Jantar Mantar to join the peaceful protest were detained or turned away at the state border by a ruling establishment petrified by the growing public support for the country’s embattled sportswomen.
This is how our champions are being treated. The world is watching us! #WrestlersProtest pic.twitter.com/rjrZvgAlSO
— Sakshee Malikkh (@SakshiMalik) May 28, 2023
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It is this fear which has changed the government’s strategy from one of silence and indifference to active repression.
Remarkably, as an Indian Express editorial reminds us, when an allegation of sexual harassment was levelled against a minister of state for external affairs in 2018, he was promptly and deservedly unsaddled. But then his name was not Brij Bhushan but (the politically and electorally irrelevant) M.J. Akbar; and thereby hangs a tale, if you know what I mean.
While the three noted women ministers in the Modi dispensation, one of whom never misses a cue to speak on all sorts of concerns regarding women, have expectedly chosen party and patriarchy over duty as elected representatives, a word is in order here about the silence of our stalwart cricketing heroes.
You may find this hard to believe, perhaps odd as well, but I was once captain of a Ranji Trophy team – when the tournament first came to Jammu and Kashmir in 1959.
For three memorable years I got to play matches with the likes of the one and only Lala Amarnath (the first Indian to score a Test hundred abroad, and also the only Indian, I think, to get the greatest batsman in Test history, namely, Don Bradman, out hit-wicket), Budhi Kunderan, Dattu Phadkar, Hemu Adhikari, Bishen Singh Bedi, Balu Gupte, Tiger Pataudi, Surendranath, among many other legendary cricketers.
Those were not the days of the IPL, however; no frisky colts then looked to be bought at high price for the Derby to come, and no teams were auctioned like springy furniture for new dachas.
We just played the game and greatly valued and learnt from those who were our victors on the field.
Those were also the days when capitalism was not yet allowed to be cut-throat, but where caring still reigned as a social and national goal. Just as films made in Hindustani carried themes that projected the egalitarian inspirations of the freedom movement.
So sportspersons and cine-stars often stood for just causes, and shared ideals in non-gluttonous and literate ways.
Now of course, our so-successful cricketers wear black arm bands when it is safe to do so– in sympathy with wronged sportspeople far away from home.
The sight also enhances the global image of our willow warriors , who are then also presented as emblematic of our overall greatness as a nation.
So, as I write, I ask myself what have been the thoughts of our cricketing greats (and let me not name them), whose every garbled syllable the populace hangs on, about our champion women wrestlers who have now been protesting in abysmal conditions against alleged sexual harassment over a long period of time by the chief of the Wrestling Federation, who also happens to be a powerful lieutenant of the BJP?
How is it that thousands of miles from home, black lives matter to them, but not the lives of our women wrestlers, abandoned by those who never tire of singing hosannas to desh ki betis?
Where are the black arm bands, we ask?
Imagine the boost their protest would receive were our current IPL-playing teams to take the knee for a brief moment before commencement of each encounter.
Although now temporarily sidelined, the unabashed strongman roams free menacingly despite a POCSO charge, among six others registered against him (after a shameful interregnum of police and political complicity), backed by the written statements of the victims several times over.
The discomfort they must have experienced from being made to do so repeatedly must have been too agonising to contemplate, as in most such cases of harassment at the hands of predators.
And here is the overarching cultural irony that votaries of Hindutva might ponder: the BJP man, six times member of parliament, now intends to “flex political muscle” in a rally in Ayodhya.
Ayodhya, you may recall, is the holy land where Lord Ram reigns as presiding god; and, who, pray, is Lord Ram? The one who, the Ramanaya tells us, waged a holy war to punish a learned Brahmin king who had let his lust for a woman get the better of him.
No savant of the scripture would disagree that Ravana was more considerable than Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, having been a king rather than merely a member of parliament.
Do sigh, if you will, at the villainy now rampant in the name of religion. Think what Ram would have thought of an Ayodhya-manipulating Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.
Is it any wonder then that our nationalist icons from the stables of the IPL etc. have been unable to persuade themselves to wear arm bands, or to visit the protest site at Jantar Mantar, least to commiserate with the women wrestlers, two or three of whom from the backwaters of Haryana have garnered more prestigious international honours than any of them?
Don’t let us forget please that the honourable Union home minister’s illustrious and accomplished son happens to be secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, although, not being from the Congress, he is not to be thought of as an undeserving dynast please.
As of this moment, I wonder particularly if any of our cricketing icons have bothered to read what the Olymic medalist, Vinesh Phogat, revealed: “Like so many girls, I had to suffer silently all these years because of this man (Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh)…What is the use of wearing medals round the neck when you cannot get justice?”
Should medals round the neck and cash reserves in bank accounts matter more than women subjected, in their words, to unspeakable humiliation?
Mr. Podsnap may have the answer.
In Dickens’s great novel, Little Dorrit – which George Bernard Shaw recommended as a better read to understand the newly arrived finance capital than Das Kapital – is one Mr. Podsnap.
He happens to have “risen” spectacularly from not-much to a whole-lot through the new phenomenon of stock-jobbery (this is the historical moment of the arrival of the Stock Exchange and of the Limited Liability Act which helped unleash the full clout of what has come to be called the exchange economy). So, he eats alone on a dining table the length of a dining hall, laden with every vittles’ money could buy; and, here is the point: when someone foolishly brings news of a new atrocity committed on ordinary English people (and England, and not just her colonies, was then replete with such atrocities on the racially outcast, the labouring and the dispossessed), Dickens has Mr. Podsnap raise his left arm in a curving elbow to ward off the ill news and its potentially unwholesome effect on his appetite, not to speak of on what conscience he has left.
Thus the phrase podsnappery.
And thus success, laced with wealth, and burnished with accolades from the numero uno yields Podsnappery at a national level.
And the so-successful are thought to be “smart” in not considering themselves their brother’s (in this case, sister’s) keeper.
This is the reason why our sterling girls protesting male brutishness and criminality are more likely to find supporters among the peasantry and sundry other lowly peoples and NGOs than among our cricketing giants whose high-priced success after all stands as one great emblem of “New India.”
As to a Kapil Dev, a Virender Sehwag, a Harbhajan Singh, an Irfan Pathan, they pre-date the glitz of “New India” and must, therefore, be considered embarrassingly old-fashioned in their expression of moral concern.
Nevertheless, there are those who will remember them and honour them for having spoken up for our women wrestlers, to the shame of our new parvenu variety.
Shame, as we know now, is not something men are supposed to experience; in India that is Bharat, only women must feel lajja, even when it is the men who bring them to a sorry pass.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
