Who is to blame for Indian wrestling's Asian Games selection controversy?

Vinesh Phogat won a bronze at the 2022 World Championships, which qualifies her for automatic selection in India's Asian Games 2023 wrestling team - as per WFI rules.

On July 20, the wrestling hall at the Indira Gandhi Stadium in New Delhi was abuzz with the sounds of a frenetic tournament in progress: the squeak of wrestling shoes on mat, the thwack and thud of bodies colliding, coaches shouting instructions or voicing their displeasure at refereeing decisions. A sizeable crowd had gathered to watch the selection trials for the Indian wrestling team for the 2023 Asian Games (September 23 - October 8, Hangzhou, China), proving just how popular wrestling, the sport of choice in rural northern India, remains.

At stake on the day were six spots for women’s Freestyle wrestling (technically, five, but more on that later) and six spots for men’s Greco Roman, with six more spots (again, technically five) for the men’s Freestyle team to be decided on July 21.

In one corner of the hall, 19-year-old women’s freestyle wrestler Antim Panghal was lost in her own world, limbering up on the warm-up mats. “I came here in a bad mood, not in the right frame of mind for a tournament,” she said with a little smile after she was done. “But warming up on the mat has taken away some of that, I feel light and focused now.”

The reason for her bad mood was also the latest controversy in the protracted and critically important saga that Indian wrestling has been engulfed in since the beginning of the year. Even if she wins the selection trials, Panghal will not represent India at the Asian Games. That’s because the Indian Olympic Association’s (IOA) ad hoc committee running Indian wrestling right now (till Wrestling Federation of India elections in August) had decided to give exemption to two wrestlers for the Asian Games—Vinesh Phogat (women’s freestyle, 53kg) and Bajrang Punia (men’s freestyle, 65kg) were automatically picked for the team based on their past performances. Panghal, who also fights in 53kg, was thus only to be a standby if she won at the trials.

Panghal is no pushover—last year, she became India’s first ever junior world champion. This year, she won a silver at the Asian Wrestling Championships, her first senior tournament—a remarkable feat for a teenager who is yet to participate in a national championship at the senior level.

When the selection trials and the exemptions were first made public by the ad hoc committee earlier this month, Panghal filed a petition with the Delhi High Court challenging the decision.

“I am not thinking about all that now,” she said, an hour before taking the mat for her first fight at the trials. She swept the competition away on Saturday. She won her final by Fall in under two minutes—a “Fall” or “Pin” is the most comprehensive way to win a wrestling match, where a fighter manages to pin both shoulder of her or his opponent to the mat simultaneously.  Moments after her win, her petition was rejected by the High Court.

“This is absolutely unfair,” Panghal said after her win. “Should I just give up on wrestling? I am going to petition the Supreme Court.”

The exemptions granted to Phogat and Punia have also met with fierce criticism and brutal trolling online: the trolls have fixated on a conspiracy theory that they have aired before—that the wrestlers who took to the streets accusing the former WFI president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment—Vinesh and Sangeeta Phogat, Sakshi Malik, and Bajrang Punia—were doing it for personal gain. What the wrestlers really wanted, the conspiracy went, was “direct entry” into the Olympics, and they wanted Singh out because the BJP MP was standing in their way.

So, who is right and who is wrong in this situation?

First things first. There is no such thing as a direct entry to the Olympics. For each weight category, wrestlers have to win Olympic qualification tournaments to earn a quota for the country in that category. While the country deserves the right to send whoever they want in that quota, historically in India, the wrestler who wins the quota at the qualification tournament goes to the Olympics. The Asian Games is not an Olympic qualifying tournament. The Wrestling World Championship (September 16-25, Belgrade, Serbia) is an Olympic qualifying tournament. And the ad hoc committee will be holding trials, without exemptions, for that tournament.

Then why this exemption for the Asian Games? That’s because the ad hoc committee was simply following the selection rules that had been put in place by the WFI. Those rules state that, specifically for the Asian Games, wrestlers who have won medals at the preceding Olympics or World Championships can be directly selected. Vinesh, the defending Asian Games champion, won a bronze at the 2022 World Championships. Punia, also the defending Asian Games champion, won a bronze at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

If that’s the case, Panghal said, why is it that Tokyo Olympics silver medallist Ravi Dahiya and Sakshi Malik, India’s only woman wrestler to win an Olympic medal, did not get direct entries? That’s because Dahiya’s coach himself told the ad hoc committee that his ward was still recovering from an injury and was not fit, and Malik did not win her Olympic medal in 2020, but in 2016—the WFI criteria says that only medallists from the Olympics immediately preceding the Asian Games will be considered for a direct entry. These are the parameters the High Court looked at when they rejected Panghal’s plea. The Supreme Court is likely to do the same, if the matter goes that far.

Though they are technically in the right for giving the exemptions, the ad hoc committee has shown that it’s not in touch with ground realities by doing so. Why would you court controversy, both for yourself, and by association for the two exempted wrestlers, right after the biggest storm in Indian sports had just about abated? Did the ad hoc committee not know of the campaign against the protesting wrestlers and how that was centred around the theory that these wrestlers wanted “direct entries” into major tournaments? Also, Phogat and Punia have spent most of the last six months living on the pavement near Jantar Mantar, the site of their protests. They have not trained, they have not competed, they have not been able to follow their diet plans, they have not rested, gone through severe mental stress, been dragged to makeshift prisons, and spent many, many sleepless nights. For them to come back to competition fitness and a good frame of mind will be a long and arduous road. Did the ad hoc committee not take that into account when giving them exemptions?

In doing this, the ad hoc committee has thrown Phogat and Punia under the bus, opening them up not just to trolling, but driving a wedge between them and fellow wrestlers like Panghal, who was a part of the first group of wrestlers who protested against Singh back in January.

One thing is for sure, Phogat and Punia are not to blame for this situation. They did not ask for exemptions. What they had asked for, along with Malik and Sangeeta Phogat, was a delayed date for the selection trials so they could be ready. The ad hoc committee told them it won’t be possible because the Asian Games organizers were not willing to push the deadline for sending in the names of participating athletes. Even if, for the sake of argument, the protesting wrestlers did ask for exemptions, it was entirely in the hands of the committee to decide whether they should get it or not.

Panghal, the next big thing in Indian wrestling, deserves better. So do two of the greatest wrestlers India has ever produced—Phogat and Punia.