Five years have passed, and yet, his voice trembles over the phone. He was 15 years old, and his nascent star was on the rise after winning a taekwondo medal for India at an Asian event. In February 2018, he went to dinner with a group of peers at the Sports Authority of India (SAI) training centre in Kashipur. They were all fellow athletes, seniors that he trusted, even looked up to. That dark night, under the influence of alcohol, he was allegedly sexually assaulted by a 17-year-old former wrestling trainee at the centre, outside the hostel premises.
“Aisa hai na, kuch cheeze na samjha sakte hai, na yaad kar sakte hai (there are certain things that cannot be put across or recalled),” he said.
He filed a complaint at the SAI centre, even as his worried parents, who live in Jaipur, rushed to his side. The next day, he left. “His parents told us that they were scared for him and didn’t think he was safe anymore. By the next morning, he was gone,” said his then coach at the Kashipur centre.
An athlete traumatised; parents petrified. A young career thrown off-track overnight.
He stayed in the sanctuary that is home for over three months, struggling with the fear that had enveloped his mind. “Every night, my father would sit me down and have long conversations with me, sometimes all night, to make sure I was okay. I wasn’t. How can anyone be after they go through something like that?” the now 18-year-old says.
His only thought was of shunning taekwondo for the painful memory it threw up. Until later that same month, when the 17-year-old accused was arrested by the Kashipur police under sections of the Pocso (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act. “Seeing him punished made a difference. It helped bring some sort of normalcy back to my life,” the athlete said.
But it was him, the victim, who had to upend his life. He had to change coaches, and move base, to a training centre in Madhya Pradesh in 2018. Four years later, he returned to Uttar Pradesh, but to another city, not Kashipur.
That young man would have watched and followed with a similar sinking feeling this January, as a host of India’s most renowned wrestlers — from Olympic medalists Bajrang Punia, Ravi Dahiya, and Sakshi Malik to two-time world championships medalist Vinesh Phogat — staged an unprecedented sit-in protest at the Jantar Mantar against their own federation and its all-powerful president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. Singh, who is in his third tenure as WFI chief, was accused by them of sexual harassment, mental torture, and “intimidation”.
The three-day protest saw an outpouring of support from fellow wrestlers, and from some other members of the Indian sport fraternity. The protesting wrestlers filed a written complaint to the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) president PT Usha against the WFI chief, officials and some coaches of the national camp. Singh, a six time MP from Uttar Pradesh who has four pending criminal cases against him, according to his 2019 parliamentary election affidavit, has denied the charges.
In response, the sports ministry has formed a five-member oversight committee, headed by boxer MC Mary Kom, to probe the allegations, while IOA has constituted a seven-member internal committee to look into charges of sexual harassment.
Four days ago, the issue reared its head again, with a 27-year-old Delhi kabaddi player accusing her of sexual harassment, extortion, and blackmail.
These controversies have once again shone a light on Indian sport’s dark underbelly of a culture of abuse; swept under the carpet by a systemic wall of silence, perpetuated by institutional apathy, and furthered by non-implementation of mechanisms of redressal.
Rot runs deep
There has been case after case after case, even just in the last 12 months.
In June 2022, a promising female cyclist levelled charges of “inappropriate behaviour” against national coach RK Sharma when the team was in Slovenia for a month-long exposure camp to prepare for the Asian Track Championships. The cyclist alleged that Sharma pressured her to share a hotel room with him. The complainant said that when she said no, she was threatened, that Sharma entered her room, harassed her, and misbehaved. There was a written complaint submitted to SAI, following which the coach was asked to return from the tour. A probe committee was formed and the coach’s contract terminated. A police complaint was filed and investigations are underway.
Her mind scarred, the athlete returned to the track in two weeks at the Asian Track Championships in New Delhi and won a medal. But her confidence in the coach who trained her for six years; the man she considered a father figure was in tatters. “I have been training at the cycling academy since 2015. From 2019 I could see that there was a change in his behaviour towards me. I was too young and fearful then. We sacrifice so much to come away from our homes, train, only with the dream to play for our country,” she said.
The same month, a female sailor accused a national coach of “mental harassment” and “making her uncomfortable” during a training trip to Europe. Soon after, in July, another case of “sexual misconduct” was reported during the India women’s U-17 football camp in Italy and Norway against the team’s assistant coach Alex Ambrose. The 39-year-old was sacked by the All India Football Federation and a police complaint filed was against him.
The problem is not restricted to national camps and training centres alone. Instances of sexual harassment in academies, hostels and sporting institutes are common, and the rot runs deep.
In 2021, a 19-year-old national-level athlete from Chennai filed a sexual harassment complaint with the police against long-time athletics coach P Nagarajan. She was later joined by more athletes who said that Nagarajan had sexually abused them over the years at his academy. The coach was arrested under sections of the IPC and Pocso Act.
Institutional response
SAI figures from 2019 till to June 2022 show 16 reported cases of sexual harassment. Of them, a penalty was issued in five cases, a police complaint was registered by the complainant or SAI in three cases, and no prima facie case was found in two complaints. Four cases are pending, one was an anonymous complaint, and one complaint was withdrawn
A 2019 report by the parliamentary committee on empowerment of women that looked at cases of sexual harassment in sport between 2014 and 2018 noted that there were 24 cases reported by sportspersons to against coaches or officials in that period.
The number may seem small, but there is a key, disconcerting word here — reported.
The committee, chaired by former Rajya Sabha MP Bijoya Chakravarty acknowledged this and said, “The number could be higher as many times cases against coaches also might have gone unreported/not complained against.” The report said that 20 of the complaints that it examined were filed by athletes against coaches. Yet, it said, there was no well-defined code of conduct in place for coaches other than — as the sports ministry submitted in its written response — efforts to “sensitize the male coaches, male players and other male officers/ staff by way of lectures /workshops etc”.
“The Committee fails to understand why the Ministry/SAI has so far never enforced a proper Code of Conduct for the coaches despite so many instances of sexual harassment cases against coaches cropping up. The Committee, therefore, strongly recommends that the Ministry/SAI should put a Code of Conduct for Coaches in place at the earliest,” the panel said.
Under the National Sports Code, 2011, national sports federations (NSF) are directed to follow a comprehensive set of guidelines to deal with cases of sexual harassment. They are required to set up a complaint mechanism and ensure “timebound treatment” of such complaints.
SAI has also passed several orders — like the one in 2015, when it issued instructions that a complaint box be installed at each training centre and that every enquiry had to be completed within three months. All staff members and coaches posted at SAI regional centres and field units were told that their involvement in any such acts would be met with the severe disciplinary action.
In June 2022, after the controversy with the cyclist, SAI made it mandatory for federations to have women coaches accompany female athletes during domestic or international travel. They also mandated that a male and a female compliance officer would be appointed in all national camps and foreign exposure tours. Pre-camp sensitisation modules were to be designed and presented to all athletes, coaches and support staff.
Federations don’t comply
But evidence suggests that federations have been lax in the implementation of such guidelines.
Take the Wrestling Federation of India for instance. It’s sexual harassment committee is not a separate panel. It is also meant to investigate ethical practices and fair play, doping practices, age fraud, and is called an “ethics commission”. Further, its composition has four men and one woman — Sakshi Malik — who was part of the January protests herself.
This is in violation of the sports code that clearly spells out that the complaint committee must be headed by a woman, and no less than half of its members must be women. In its reply to the sports ministry, WFI has said that it has followed the sports code, but the ministry has suspended the body till such time the enquiry against WFI is completed.
“There are enough provisions and guidelines on what needs to be done to ensure safety of women sports persons. But these are all on paper. The will to put them into practice is missing,” says Ashwini Nachappa, a former star athlete, Olympian and sports activist.
“If such things are being reported by elite players, I shudder to think what happens at the state and district level. We need to ensure a safe environment at every level through new mechanisms – whether it is a hotline, or one independent committee for handling these issues. Such a committee should not be chosen by the federations and we need to institutionalise counsellors,” Nachappa added.
The graver problem that aids a veil of silence is that even those that do come forward must deal with an environment where there is little to no action. The parliamentary committee report listed 24 cases in all, but only three accused were dismissed from service, while one was handed “compulsory retirement”.
Priyanka Prabhakar, a leading sports psychologist who has had first-hand experience of dealing with victims of abuse says victims are often left “extremely lonely, ashamed, and scared. “They can be isolated and often don’t find support,” Prabhakar said.
But not all abuse falls into the straight jacket of sexual harassment.
In India, Prabhakar says, there is a general lack of awareness of what the term encompasses. The 306-page Whyte Review — an independent review into allegations of abuse in British gymnastics between 2008 and 2020 —found athletes being subjected to all kinds of harassment. In over 400 submissions made by gymnasts, from grassroots to elite levels, around 50% reported emotional abuse and 40% physical abuse. This ranged from fat-shaming in front of peers that led to young gymnasts hiding food and starving before competitions, verbal abuse comprising frequent swearing, gaslighting, and other forms of emotional harassment.
In India, where coaches are demi-gods, their often unreasonable writ running large, these boundaries are often blurred. “Many athletes come from poor backgrounds, so there is a lot of fear of speaking out,” Prabhakar said. “ But before we get to that stage, what is important is education and awareness of what boundaries cannot be crossed, even in sport.”