BackPLAY THINGS: Vijender Singh and the other ring
What kind of relationship does crime and sport have in India?
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The Vijender Singh I know is a calm, patient man, with a deep love for his sport. In the years that I have tracked his career, spending hours at the practice sessions at the National Institute of Sports in Patiala, I have seen with awe the intelligence, the drive, and the swagger that he brought even to daily training routines. And despite the brutal and utterly exhausting demands of his sport, Vijender always has his humour and warmth intact. Now there is a possibility that his career might end abruptly, and worse, dishonourably. If that happens, it will be a sad end to a sparkling athletic personality. The virtues I listed above, of course, are no reason why he might not be involved in the sordid tale of crime his name is now embroiled in—manufacturing, distributing and smuggling narcotics. So far there is little evidence against Vijender directly, though the main accused, NRI drug smuggler Anoop Singh Kahlon appears to know Vijender well. Vijender’s Patiala sparring partner and former national heavyweight champion Ram Singh’s involvement in the ring (the narcotics one that is) seems much more clear and damning. Hopefully Vijender did not do much more than buy heroine off Kahlon for his own personal use—which is not exactly good news for his athletic career or image, but at least it’s not outright criminal.
Unfortunately, athletes are not outside the reach of organised crime. The most curious relationship between sports and organised crime exists in the world of Indian wrestling. Local wrestlers across India have the unfortunate reputation of being enforcers for gangs and politicians, bodyguards and henchmen for MLAs with unsavoury reputations, or worse, hitmen and gang leaders themselves. This is curious because wrestling in India is not just a sport, and is not defined in simple terms of athletic success. Wrestling is a cultural phenomenon, a philosophical study of the body and the mind, and a way of life considered to be pure and ascetic. A pehelwan or wrestler is a pehelwan for life, even when he has given up the sport.
Wrestling is used widely in villages across the country as a way to keep young men away from the lure of crime. For example, Sarfabad village in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, has a mandate that at least one child from each family in the village must join the akhara (wrestling school). This was put into effect a little more than ten years back, when the village was notorious for producing criminals. Now Sarfabad is better known for producing talented wrestlers, close to 40 of whom are regulars in national and state competitions.
On the flip side, in 2011, police records from Rajasthan revealed that wrestlers or former wrestlers headed the list of wanted criminals in the state that year, including Hola pehelwan, a kushti (traditional Indian wrestling) champion turned hitman. Jagan Gurjar, another kushti champion who became the leader of a gang in Chambal, accumulated almost a hundred cases of armed robbery, extortion, and attempted murder before surrendering in 2009. Hyderabad, a city with an illustrious wrestling history, is now notorious for its pehelwan community’s involvement in various criminal activities.
This is not new. Wrestling has always been a sport that has thrived on patronage—kings, emperors, royal families, influential land owners and businessmen all retained wrestlers under their pay as physical symbols of their power and clout—evidence of this relationship goes back hundreds of years. Hanuman, the patron god of Indian wrestling, is seen as an agent of Ram’s power and influence in his many wrestling victories.
Symbolic stories of a wrestler’s prowess can be found woven into the tales and legends of royal families and former princely states of India. In the 19th Century, Kasam Ali, the chief wrestler of Indore’s Maharaja Holkar, is said to have been so big, that a normal man could easily slip his whole body through one leg-hole of his briefs. Shiva Pehelwan, another wrestler in the Maharaja’s retinue, is said to have broken up a fight between two bulls by hurling one to the left and the other to the right. One of the reasons wrestlers have enjoyed this patronage is because they have always stood for an exalted set of ideological principles—extreme discipline, moral virtue, clean living, austerity, physical strength, abstinence, and an absence of material greed. But symbols walk the gap between reality and an idea. When this gap is made visible, the same wrestler who is known in fables as the righteous man of the kingdom could easily also have been the king’s henchman. It doesn’t take much imagination to make that connection.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Vijender. He owes us another Olympic medal. I hope he gets the chance.
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