At Olympics, India’s top women wrestlers have more at stake than medals

In Haryana, the fear of one man has threatened to destroy many champions’ dreams. Now, they are fighting back.

Rohtak, India – On a hot summer afternoon, a strapping, fit man in his 30s drove his SUV to the outskirts of the crowded city of Rohtak in the northern Indian state of Haryana. Peeling off the main road, he braked at a large white metal gate of a sports stadium. The gate hadn’t been opened in years and the stadium looked empty. It was the only place he felt safe, he said, to meet and talk.

“You can’t use my name, and you can’t use hers,” the man, wearing a loose grey T-shirt, black basketball shorts and slippers, said.

The air conditioning in the SUV was on full blast, but the chill didn’t calm his nerves. He made sure I put away my recorder – the sight of it made him nervous. Then he began narrating a chilling account of one of the most powerful men in Indian sports, accused of sexually abusing young wrestlers for at least a decade.

“When she told me about her sexual harassment, I wept,” the man in the SUV, the guardian of one of the women wrestlers, said while staring down at the car’s floor, suddenly sounding weary.

Different versions of this story had played out on Indian television channels, and the streets of the country’s capital, for months. The victims were many, the man accused of tormenting them the same: Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then a politician from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the president of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI).