An excerpt from Sakshi Malik’s Witness: Defiance to farce

An excerpt from wrestler Sakshi Malik’s new book Witness. How protesting wrestlers were forced to give up the decision to immerse their medals

While on a protest against the Wresting Federation of India and its then powerful chief Brij Bhushan Saran Singh over alleged sexual harassment and other misdemeanours, Olympic medallist Sakshi Malik and other wrestlers were brutally grabbed by the Delhi Police. In this excerpt, Malik recalls what happened when the wrestlers decided to immerse their medals in the Ganga at Haridwar. An excerpt:

All the wrestlers who had brought their medals went and sat along the ghat even as a crowd surrounded us. While we were sitting there, someone came and took Bajrang Punia away, saying Home Minister Amit Shah wanted to talk to him. The rest of us were instructed to wait until 7 p.m. because there was a ‘big’ meeting going on between Bajrang and Shah. We sat there on that ghat for half an hour, hoping against hope that Shah would actually call Brij Bhushan and dismiss him.

Simultaneously, we also got word from Naresh Tikait, a senior activist who was known to all of us as one of the leaders of the farm rights agitation from a year ago and whom we respected as an elder of the Jat community we belonged to, to wait until he could speak to us.

I’d always imagined that one day, when I became a mother, my daughter would point to the wall, to my framed Olympic medal, and ask me what it was. And I would open that frame and show it to her. I might be older and out of shape by then and my kids might think I was just a boring mom, but I’d tell them what that medal was. I’d tell them the story of how their mom won it. I’d tell them the story of how she met their dad. How she was something once, a long time ago.

But instead, I was on that ghat, about to throw that medal away, all because I’d tried to fight for a cause I knew was right, hoping against hope for a favour from a politician that might stop that from happening.

As the crowd got bigger and bigger and tighter around us as we waited, my heart started to sink. I knew that we were being backed into a corner. And then, suddenly, from the midst of that crowd, Tikait emerged. He unwrapped the safa on his head, walked up to each of us, took our medals and placed them in that cloth. He told us the medals were the pride of the country and he’d make things all right.

Then he walked away from the ghat, leaving us there by ourselves.