The most important sports story of 2023 was the wrestlers' protest. It was unique in profile and scale, and ultimately duration: three of the country's greatest ever wrestlers took on the system - the wrestling federation, the sports ministry, the wider sporting ecosystem - for two protests in the heart of the national capital. Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia, and several of their peers and contemporaries, were protesting against the running of the Wrestling Federation of India, specifically against the alleged serial sexual harassment of women wrestlers by its president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.
The story was reported in the media, but the narrative was always hostage to various competing perspectives, especially those of the people in positions of power. In her *memoir Witness Sakshi gives the wrestlers' side of the story. We already know the timeline from when the wrestlers first sat down at Jantar Mantar to the emotional scenes at Haridwar but Witness adds detail, especially the "why" and the "how" to the "what". And what emerges, in Sakshi's words, is a tale of broken promises, of how each stage of the protest was undone by naivete and misplaced trust, of how the protesters "had been gamed" by everyone else.
There's a caveat, of course, when reading this: It's Sakshi's version (and presumably that of Vinesh and Bajrang too). But when you consider who was on the other side, putting out one's own story becomes risky business, which adds credence to this.
It all started with someone very close to the wrestlers -- Babita Phogat, cousin to Vinesh and sister-in-law to Bajrang. Sakshi writes about how Babita -- whose connections with the BJP were public - convinced them all that she had a line to the topmost levels of the Indian government, and people in power would ensure the wrestlers would get justice. Babita convinced them to start the protest and then distanced herself from it; as the book notes, she was never at the protest site. For her it had been a big political game; for Sakshi and the wrestlers, they'd laid everything on the line. The brutality of this betrayal hit all three of them deep, but it was to be only the beginning.
Over the course of the next few months, the wrestlers would feel the full force of the indifference (and opposition) of the Indian political machinery. They got a sample of it early on when, three days into the protest, they met the then Union sports minister, Anurag Thakur. In an emotionally charged environment, as Sakshi and her fellow women wrestlers detailed their harrowing encounters with Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, Thakur sat emotionless, with an expression that indicated he just wanted it all to be over with.
"Anurag Thakur sat there, listening quietly," Sakshi writes. "There was no emotion on his face. If he was shocked by anything he heard, he didn't show it. His reaction was in complete contrast to everyone else's. As each of us told our stories, the atmosphere in the room became steadily more emotional. Some of the younger girls were already breaking down in tears. But Thakur could have been listening to someone talking about the weather. It was as if he was bored and just wanted our meeting to be over. "
While still at Thakur's house, Bajrang received a call from Union home minister Amit Shah, who assured them of action being taken against Singh. On that assurance, and despite their reservations, they called off their initial protest. The moment they did that, though, Sakshi knew something was off. "I broke down," she writes. "I had done everything with absolute sincerity, and despite that, I'd been tricked. It felt as if the wind had been kicked out of my stomach"
Thakur then said Singh would be withdrawn from the daily functioning of the federation, which would now be run by an oversight committee. It would include, on Sakshi's suggestion, Mary Kom, whom Sakshi held up as a role model for her fearlessness and champion attitude.
This initially gave the wrestlers hope. On hearing Sakshi's account of her harassment by Singh, Mary even told her that it was similar to what she had experienced too, that she would ensure Sakshi and the wrestlers got justice.
One of the more harrowing passages in the book is Sakshi's description of the wrestlers who'd made allegations against Singh testifying before the IOA committee investigating the charges:
"All of us thirteen female wrestlers sat in the same room and told our stories, one after the other. It was difficult for the younger ones, but they knew that their seniors were standing right alongside them. One of the girls telling her story was very young... She started to cry as she recalled this, and the other young girls started to cry too. Once they began to weep, I couldn't control myself. I started tearing up, and then Vinesh did too. The women members of the committee who were listening to us, and finally the woman lawyer, who were in the same room, started to cry too. They started to hug the girls who were testifying. They said 'Please don't cry, we will get you justice. Don't worry.'
Mary Kom too said she would get us justice. It was a very emotional moment for all of us, but it was cathartic too. Finally, everyone had to started to understand what we were dealing with. Their tears told us they believed us. Now they would go to the IOA and the government and tell them just how rotten the state of Indian wrestling was."
Nothing happened, however. The final report that the committee submitted had nothing of substance in it. "Were the committee members' jobs and positions so important to them that they couldn't even stand up for what was right? That they couldn't admit that women wrestlers in the country were facing sexual harassment," writes Sakshi.
Friends, politicians, and now fellow sportspersons had all thrown them under the bus. They learned from this (or thought they had), and for the second protest, there was no easy appeasement, no falling for false promises. The book details the hardships they faced while spending days and nights in the open in the Delhi summer, but also the kindness of strangers, of ordinary Indians -- mostly farmers from Haryana -- who would come to the protest, show their solidarity and give them money for the cause.
Eventually, the wrestlers took their protest to Hardwar, where they planned to immerse their medals into the Ganga. In the drama that unfolded, with calls from various political and social leaders, only person emerged a winner -- the farmer leader Naresh Tikait, who snatched away the medals from the bewildered, emotionally charged wrestlers' hands, and nullified the whole protest. "Within a couple of minutes," she writes, "we realised what a tremendous mistake we had made. What was supposed to be a great act of defiance had turned into a complete farce. Not only had we not been able to get Brij Bhushan Singh out of the federation or give up our medals, but we had also broken our word to the people who had supported us."
That broke the back of the protest but the final nail, she writes, came from Shah and Thakur again, when they promised to listen to the wrestlers' requests and ensure a woman candidate would become president of the federation. This is when they finally decided to get off the streets completely -- only to see Singh's cronies hoisted into power in the elections a few months later, with not a woman administrator in sight.
The defeat had been total. Having started the protest with the intention of forcing Singh out of power, of trying to ensure his crimes were paid for, it had all ended with the sight of Singh celebrating loudly, garlands around his neck, all the power still ensconced in his clenched fists.
*Witness, by Sakshi Malik with Jonathan Selvaraj, is published by Juggernaut Books