National life is increasingly being gripped by a sense of despondence and the society is surprisingly acting numb even in situations of grave provocations. The complaint and street protests in the national capital by seven ace wrestlers against “prolonged sexual harassment” by Wrestling Federation of India’s president and BJP member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, might perhaps be the tip of the iceberg. The protests over the past 12 days came as a bombshell on the sports bodies as a whole and have exposed their underbelly. The Modi government is in the dock for its abject failure to comprehend the gravity of the situation. It has responded to the complaints in a routine manner by ordering an inquiry in January last and issuing an advisory to sports bodies to strictly adhere to the guidelines governing their functioning. It is refusing to arrest Brij Bhushan and take him to task. The Supreme Court is satisfied with the fact that an FIR has been lodged against the accused.
In between, the panel headed by Mary Kom did a job by squarely pointing out to the government that the internal complaints committee as mandated by the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act of 2013 is not functional in the wrestling body. This also led to a realization that such a mechanism is defunct in most such national-level entities. While rules are framed and laws enacted with commendable seriousness by governments and legislative bodies, the problem lies in the lack of seriousness in their implementation. As a result, the situations keep worsening, rather than improving.
Coming to the crux of the problem, the installation of wayward politicians at the head of every sports entity has been a practice for long. That they rubbish these entities is evident also from the way the most populated nation of 1.40 billion is putting up a pathetic show at every Olympics or even in the Asian Games and the CWG. And, the scam that the political bosses perpetrated in the Commonwealth Games in Delhi is fresh in everyone’s mind. That the Congress governments started the practice of installing politicians at the head of such sports bodies should not have been an excuse for the NDA to carry such unacceptable systems forward. Instead, at the first opportunity, Amit Shah’s son Jay Shah was brought into commanding positions in cricket bodies like BCCI and ACC. Such positions involve huge income and power equal to a minister. The misuse of such authority by a ‘criminal’ like Brij Bhushan has come to such a pass that the nation now hangs its head in shame.