The fall of Sushil Kumar and Indian wrestling - The Morning Context

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• Savita watches this video from 2017 longingly a couple of times. Then she moves to the next video but soon realizes it is the semi-final that Sagar lost. So she moves on to the next. Then the next. When the international bouts are over, she watches shaky videos shot over cheap mobile phones of local dangals from the past.

• She sits in one corner of her unplastered house in Sonepat’s Shiv Nagar, watching and rewatching these videos. Sometimes she smiles. Mostly she cries. The memories bring relief and pain, but she hangs on to them. That’s all she has of Sagar, who died after a brawl at Chhatrasal Stadium, his alma mater, in north Delhi’s Model Town area, on the intervening night of 4 and 5 May. He was 23.

• 20 August 2008. The date will remain etched as the turning point in the annals of Indian wrestling. A 56-year-old curse had finally been broken. By winning the bronze medal at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, Sushil Kumar single-handedly changed Indian wrestling forever.

• “We told him, ‘Don’t worry. This guy will reach the final, and you will get another shot at the medal via repechage. That’s exactly what happened. He won three bouts in 70 minutes.” (Repechage—pronounced ray-pay-shaj—is a system where losers to the eventual finalists in earlier rounds get another chance to fight.)

• While Yogeshwar won a bronze via repechage in the 60kg weight class, Sushil bettered his performance from Beijing and won a silver in the 66kg category, in what remains India’s best performance in wrestling at the Olympics

• For nearly two decades, Sushil and Yogeshwar were inseparable. They shared rooms, trained together and witnessed the highs and lows of the sport together.

• Overnight, the boy from Baprola, a suburb outside Najafgarh in west Delhi, became a celebrity. People who used to tease his father Diwan Singh, a driver with state-owned telecoms service provider MTNL, for carrying milk and almonds for his son at Chhatrasal Stadium every morning, would now come to him seeking advice.

• Sushil is the biggest name in Indian wrestling today. Except for gold medals at the Olympics and the Asian Games, he has won everything. In 2010, he became India’s first and only wrestler to win the World Championships.

• “It was a perfect example, you know,” says Ajit Singh, “of how far dedication and determination can take you. Eat, train, sleep. For 20 years, he did nothing but follow this routine.”

• The way he lived, trained, inspired others and instilled respect are the stuff of legend. Never in his life has he missed a training session except when injured.

• People who have known him for years say he is extremely polite, soft-spoken, stable and grounded. He is also forever conscious of his image; he always said and did the politically correct things and never went off-script.

• To older wrestlers and his coaches, he is always respectful. To young wrestlers, he is always accessible. His posters adorn hostel rooms at Chhatrasal.

• That Sushil Kumar had to hide his face behind a towel when he was paraded by Delhi Police’s Special Cell in front of cameras following his arrest on 23 May in connection with the beating that led to the death of Sagar Dhankhar.

• Sushil took a shine to young Sagar soon after he joined Chhatrasal back in 2013.

• “If Sushil was giving someone a hard time, they came to Sagar and said, ‘Kehna pehalwaan ne, jyada tang kar rya hai’ (tell Sushil he is going too hard on me),” says Narendra Dhankhar, Sagar’s uncle. “Sagar would talk to Sushil and he would back off. They had that kind of camaraderie.”

• Soon, the search began to find the best wrestling school for Sagar. After the London Olympics, there was only one place to head to: Chhatrasal Stadium.

• Chhatrasal is different. People call it the Mecca of Indian wrestling, the conveyor belt of Olympians.

• Out of the five medals at the Olympics, three have been won by athletes training at Chhatrasal. All three male wrestlers who have qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games—Ravi Dahiya, Bajrang Punia and Deepak Punia—are Chhatrasal alumni, although Bajrang isn’t part of Chhatrasal anymore.

• On the night of 4 May, Sagar lay on the ground inside the stadium that was once home, severely beaten—allegedly by his mentor—and unable to move till a police control room van answered a call.

• The PCR van of the Delhi Police responded to calls of gunshots fired at Chhatrasal Stadium around midnight on 4 May, found Sagar and others injured, and rushed them to Babu Jagjivan Ram Memorial Hospital in Jahangirpuri. Sagar was referred to the Trauma Centre, where he succumbed to his injuries. Now he lay on a gurney, his body—riddled with patches of blue and purple—still warm to the touch, his eyes closed and lips curled in a half-smile, inside the mortuary.

• Pradeep told the BBC that “two groups of wrestlers were fighting” and “by the time Kumar arrived at the spot of the clash, they had run away”. Sonu Mahal, who was also severely beaten that night, has said that it was indeed Sushil who was beating them with a baseball bat.

• What we know is that the death of Sagar Dhankhar following the beating, allegedly in the presence of his mentor or, worse, at his hands, is a tragedy. We know that an athlete who single-handedly changed the perception around pehalwans (wrestlers) and elevated Indian wrestling to the Olympic podium after half a century now cowers under a cloak of dishonour of his own making.

• On 4 May, it led to an altercation between Sushil and Sagar and Sonu, where one of the two—it isn’t clear who—grabbed Sushil by his collar and called him names.

• A call was made—either by Sushil or his aide Ajay—to people from the gang led by Neeraj Sehrawat, aka Neeraj Bawana, one of Delhi’s most notorious gangsters who continues to run his operations from the high-security ward of Jail No. 2 at Tihar prison.

• Their next stop was a Model Town flat where they picked up Sagar, Sonu and another friend and brought them to the stadium, where they were beaten till an inch of death. When it went too far, Sushil fled the scene.

• “This wasn’t the first time Sushil’s name came up in a brawl like this. There was the incident with the grocery shop owner as well,” says one person who has known Sushil for a long time and tracked this case since day one, requesting anonymity.

• Two calls were made, one reporting gunfire, and a second, reportedly by another victim who managed to flee, informing the police that Sushil was beating some people. The police jumped into action only after the second call, which doesn’t find mention in the FIR.

• There are gaping holes in the police’s theory. Not just that, different sources give out diverse stories to media outlets.

• According to the police, the clash happened because of a property dispute. Sagar was living in a flat that was registered in the name of Sushil’s wife. Things escalated when Sagar was asked to vacate the flat, and he refused.

• Another theory doing the rounds is that of a woman from eastern Europe, said to be Sonu’s girlfriend, who Ajay had misbehaved with at a party. Sonu denied this in an interview to news channel Aaj Tak.

• Virender came to Chhatrasal in 2004 and stayed there, first as a wrestler and then as a coach on deputation. He says he took a transfer from Chhatrasal to focus on his family, but insiders tell a story of a fallout between him and Sushil.

• When Sushil was eventually arrested on 23 May—after almost three weeks on the run—police said a Special Cell team made the arrest in Mundka in West Delhi. Sushil was driving a two-wheeler with Ajay riding pillion as they came to collect money from one of their associates.

• “Knowing Sushil’s love for cars, it is inconceivable that he was driving a scooty,” says another person who has known the wrestler for years. “He didn’t have any shortage of cars or even money. Why would he come from Haryana to Delhi to collect some cash? It seems more like a staged arrest.”

• Sushil had also been on the run because of a threat to his life from Kala Jathedi, according to several people.

• Sandeep Kala, aka Kala Jathedi, from Jathedi village in Sonepat, Haryana, started as a cable operator and became one of the most dreaded gangsters across Delhi, Haryana and Uttarakhand. A rival of Neeraj Bawana, he is currently believed to be in Dubai.

• Sonu, one of the victims of the brawl who has multiple criminal cases registered against him, is said to be Sandeep’s nephew and his beating seems to have aggravated the situation.

• “Sagar was a good wrestler initially, but he couldn’t make it and slipped into the clutches of crime,” says one of the people quoted above. “Pehalwanji was running a racket from the stadium. He used to identify disputed properties. Capture them and register them in the name of trusted people. The Model Town flat in question was one such property. He asked Sagar to stay there to maintain the hold. Sagar refused. Pehalwanji couldn’t do anything legally about it.”

• As Sushil came closer to Neeraj Bawana and kept the business growing, Sandeep tried to gain control through Sonu and Sagar, which led to the friction between the star and his protege.

• Sushil’s alleged ties with gangsters and his other businesses are an open secret in the wrestling fraternity. Everyone knows about them, but few acknowledge them, and even fewer people talk about them.

• “I keep telling parents to put their children into sports because sports teaches them discipline and teamwork,” says Ajit. “But you must have a plan B for them. Millions of children train for the Olympics. But not everyone can become a Sakshi Malik or an Abhinav Bindra or a P.V. Sindhu.”

• Sports is brutal. It doesn’t choose all of those pursuing it, even if they have given up everything for sports. Many from its long tail get government jobs; some go back to farming, and some do odd jobs. But a handful of them fall through the cracks, into the clutches of crime.

• This is why Sushil’s involvement in such activities is more perplexing. He had everything: money, fame, respect and the love of 1.3 billion people and still fell into the trap.

• In the weeks leading to the brawl, Sushil was said to be training hard at Chhatrasal Stadium in what would have been a final push to make the cut for the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to start later this month after getting delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Athletes are trained to push their limits every time they fall and make comebacks when there shouldn’t be any. This becomes a habit. After a point, they forget how or where to draw the line. They forget when to call it a day.

• “If you’re not a cricketer in India, you will never make enough money in your career to have a comfortable life,” says another person quoted above. “So they make alternative business plans. Some open restaurants, others start clothing lines.”

• “In Sushil’s case, a few things happened. He wanted the money as well as the power. Why else will he ask someone to record the beating so he could circulate it later?” asks this person.

• Supplying muscle power to those who needed it was a natural progression. Soon, Sushil started taking contracts for toll plazas in outer Delhi—Mundka, Najafgarh, etc.—West Delhi and the Haryana-Delhi border. Since he couldn’t be the face of the business, he gave it to trusted people to run.

• One month since Sagar’s death, brand Sushil has taken a beating. Northern Railway has suspended the Olympian and WFI may not renew the wrestler’s annual contract, although the federation has said that this decision has nothing to do with the case.

• “The kind of renaissance kushti saw, the image that changed after years of hard work is all reversed. Now people will again think that all pehalwans are thugs,” says one of the persons quoted above. “It is the same image Sushil’s bronze medal changed, and by a twisted turn of fate, it is reversed by something he is said to have done.”

• “Kay bataoon, kitni ummedein thi. Sab pe paani fir gaya. Par ab bhi samajh nahi aa raha, ke hua, galti kya thi (We had many hopes. All of that is gone now. But I still don’t understand what happened, what was Sagar’s fault)?”