New Delhi: Indian wrestler Vinesh Phogat returned her Khel Ratna and Arjuna awards, the highest national sports awards, on Saturday (December 30) in protest, surrendering her medals in Central Vista’s Kartavya Path after the Delhi Police stopped her from reaching the Prime Minister’s Office.
Phogat, an Olympian and a gold medalist at Asian and Commonwealth games, had earlier declared in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that she will be returning her awards as a mark of protest, while saying that such awards were meaningless in a situation where women wrestlers were struggling to get justice.
यह दिन किसी खिलाड़ी के जीवन में न आए। देश की महिला पहलवान सबसे बुरे दौर से गुज़र रही हैं। #vineshphogat pic.twitter.com/bT3pQngUuI
— Bajrang Punia 🇮🇳 (@BajrangPunia) December 30, 2023
The wrestlers’s protests, led by Olympians Sakshi Malik, Phogat, and Bajrang Punia, against alleged sexual harassment by former Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief and BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, was met with cold treatment by the Union government, forcing the international-level wrestlers to stage a dharna at the heart of the national capital for days. The government buckled under pressure and promised that it would look into the matter and take corrective action. The Delhi Police then filed an FIR on the basis of allegations, but the delay in acting on the complaint only demoralised the wrestlers further.
The matter snowballed again when Sanjay Singh, a close aide of Brij Bhushan Singh’s, contested the WFI elections and won by a big margin, causing a public meltdown among many of the protesting wrestlers. Even then, the newly-elected Sanjay Singh made no bones about his close association with Brij Bhushan Singh, and announced that the junior national tournaments will be held in Nandini Nagar in Brij Bhushan Singh’s stronghold in Uttar Pradesh’s Gonda.
Singh continues to be a BJP MP and is likely to play a key campaigning role ahead of the 2024 elections.
The Union government suspended the newly-elected leadership of the WFI for alleged irregularities, and replaced it with a three-member ad-hoc committee soon after Olympian Sakshi Malik announced her retirement as yet another mark of protest. With Phogat now returning her awards, the matter refuses to end even as the wrestlers’s allegations of sexual harassment continues to remain in a limbo. Earlier, Punia too had returned his awards.
On Saturday, Phogat kept her awards in the middle of Kartavya Path. The Delhi Police picked the medals later. Earlier in a letter to Modi, Phogat has claimed that women wrestlers’ lives are not like those “fancy government advertisements” that talk about women’s upliftment.
Meanwhile, Punia urged the Union government to resume wrestling activities as soon as possible as there have been no tournaments in the last few months. “We have the Olympic Games in 7 months but no one seems serious about it while in the last four Olympics, wrestlers brought consecutive medals,” Punia posted on X.