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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Unsung Champions

The Commonwealth Games have once again reminded India of a sporting truth that is too often forgotten amid the deafening roar of cricket stadiums, billion-dollar leagues and celebrity endorsements. The greatest sporting stories of at the CWG have emerged from dusty fields, improvised training grounds and lives shaped by extraordinary adversity. India’s athletes in Glasgow have rewritten the meaning of sporting triumph. The story of Sharmila Dhankar is nothing short of extraordinary. Struck by...

Unsung Champions

The Commonwealth Games have once again reminded India of a sporting truth that is too often forgotten amid the deafening roar of cricket stadiums, billion-dollar leagues and celebrity endorsements. The greatest sporting stories of at the CWG have emerged from dusty fields, improvised training grounds and lives shaped by extraordinary adversity. India’s athletes in Glasgow have rewritten the meaning of sporting triumph. The story of Sharmila Dhankar is nothing short of extraordinary. Struck by polio at the age of two, having endured the trauma of an abusive marriage, she could have been reduced to a statistic in a country where disability and social barriers often combine to crush ambition. Instead, the 40-year-old from Haryana transformed pain into power, producing a season’s best throw of 9.81 metres to become India’s first para-athlete to win a Commonwealth Games gold medal. Her victory in the women’s shot put F57 event was a declaration of human resilience. Sharmila’s journey, from physical disability and personal hardship to the top step of a global podium, captures the very essence of sport. Her compatriot Shilpa Shyla’s bronze medal in the same event added another chapter to this inspiring tale. Together, the two Indian women demonstrated that determination can overcome disadvantages that would have stopped many others. Sarvesh Kushare, who won a historic silver in the men’s high jump, comes from a farming family in Maharashtra’s Nashik district. His early training ground was not a sophisticated sports facility but makeshift pits created from agricultural waste by his father. Gulveer Singh’s magnificent silver in the men’s 10,000 metres - India’s first-ever medal in the event at the Commonwealth Games - was another reminder that Indian endurance athletes, often overlooked in a cricket-obsessed sporting ecosystem, possess the talent and tenacity to compete with the best in the world. These athletes represent a different India that battles scarcity, limited facilities and social constraints before it battles opponents on the track or field. Their medals are not products of privilege but triumphs of persistence. For decades, cricket has deservedly enjoyed its place as India’s most popular sport. But the imbalance in attention, resources and public imagination cannot continue indefinitely. A nation of 1.4 billion people cannot measure its sporting identity through one game alone. The Commonwealth Games have shown India a mirror that reflects not just medals, but the immense human potential waiting beyond the spotlight. The achievements in Glasgow should become a turning point. India must invest more deeply in athletics, para-sports and Olympic disciplines, not merely when medals arrive but when dreams begin. Because every Sharmila Dhankar, Sarvesh Kushare and Gulveer Singh represents the extraordinary sporting potential of India waiting to be unleashed.

Warped Justice

In Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal, freedom of expression is a conditional privilege, revoked when it fails to appease the political whims of her government’s core constituency. This grim reality became unmistakably clear when the state’s police force travelled over 1,500 kilometres to arrest a 22-year-old law student and Hindu social media influencer for a video critical of Pakistan and Islamist terror. Her supposed crime? A profane video denouncing jihadist ideology following the Pahalgam terror attack. The actual offence, it would appear, was daring to speak as a Hindu with unfiltered rage.


That the video was swiftly deleted and followed by a public apology mattered not to the West Bengal police. Nor did the deluge of threats - from rape to decapitation - that the young woman received from radical Islamists online. The West Bengal government, unmoved by such calls to violence, sprang into action not to protect the citizen under siege, but to punish her. In Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal, you may mock Hindu gods with impunity and riot in the name of religious grievance without consequence. But criticising Islam (or Pakistan) can land you in jail. Dissent is criminal if it inconveniences the ruling party’s vote bank. And law enforcement is not an impartial arbiter of justice, but an outsourced instrument of appeasement.


Consider what the state did not do. When Islamist mobs tore through Murshidabad on April 11, unleashing targeted violence against Hindus under the pretext of opposing the Waqf Amendment Act, the government did nothing. Hindu homes were razed, water supplies poisoned, and women threatened with gang rape unless they abandoned their faith.


In Sandeshkhali, the horror was worse. There, women had accused local TMC leaders with direct ties to Mamata’s political inner circle of abducting, raping and threatening them with death. The state’s reaction was both callous and cowardly. The Chief Minister, a woman herself, dismissed these credible allegations as ‘minor incidents.’ It took a court order from the Calcutta High Court to initiate a proper probe, which the government opposed with stubborn zeal.


Yet the arrest of this social media influencer was executed with impressive speed and surgical precision. This is not secular governance but selective enforcement.


India does not have a blasphemy law nor should it. But Mamata Banerjee’s government has found a way to mimic one. Insult Islam, however tangentially, and the state will hunt you down.


This is no longer a local crisis but a national embarrassment. The Constitution guarantees freedom of expression and equality before the law. West Bengal, under its current dispensation, delivers neither. And as long as vote-bank politics dictate who can speak and who must remain silent, the state will continue its descent into communal opportunism and authoritarian caprice. India must decide if it will tolerate this perverse inversion of justice. If a young woman can be jailed for defending her country while those who threaten her walk free, then the idea of a plural and free India is in mortal peril.

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