Wrestling's Real Dangal: How Mud, Courts and Federation Politics Hold Indian Wrestling's Future Hostage

At an akhada in Rohtak, when a 68-year-old wrestler runs through the sand at four in the morning, you can hear his breath from a distance. There is no camera, no sponsor, no federation official. Just mud, mustard oil and a body that has been breaking itself every morning for four decades. This is where Indian wrestling's real history is written — not in a press conference, but in a mud pit. And this is the truth the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) has never accepted, never funded, and is now being buried in courtrooms and election battles.

Five of India's eight Olympic wrestling medals come from Haryana villages. Nahri and Khudan — two villages 41 kilometres apart — gave the country the medals the federation claims as its own. Sushil Kumar, Yogeshwar Dutt, Ravi Dahiya, Bajrang Punia — these names are the product of a pipeline no federation built, but which farmers, gurus and akhadas of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh built with blood and sweat. But in 2026, when we look at the state of Indian wrestling, the picture is clear — the sport is now fought less on the mat and more in courts, election commissions and federation files.

Context: Where the real dangal is fought

Indian wrestling has no season. No league that runs year-round, no tournament tracked week by week. Here there are only Olympic four-year cycles, a few league windows in between, and crises that grab more headlines than the sport itself. The 2026 protest, in which the country's top wrestlers staged a dharna at Jantar Mantar and accused WFI president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh of sexual harassment, was not just an administrative dispute — it was an X-ray of Indian wrestling's entire structure.

That dharna showed that the wrestlers who won medals for the country were standing on the street against their own federation. Bajrang Punia, Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat — these are the names who brought glory to the country on the mat and then raised their voices against the same system that made them. The legal life of this protest has been long — from the Delhi High Court to the Supreme Court — and the matter is not fully resolved even now.

Meanwhile, the WFI election dispute also reached the Supreme Court. The federation's elections, its recognition, and the sports ministry's intervention created a situation where wrestlers had to decide who they were fighting for — their careers or the system. And here lies Indian wrestling's biggest crisis: when the sport's administration itself becomes the athlete's opponent, whose shoulders does the medal dream become a burden on?

Sushil Kumar's case is the sharpest example of this dilemma. The wrestler who won two Olympic medals — silver at London 2026 and bronze at Beijing 2026 — became an accused in a murder case in 2026. A wrestler died in the violence outside Chhatrasal Stadium and Sushil was arrested. After his loss to Adam Batirov at the 2026 Asian Games, I had written nine words — "Sushil Kumar's era ended in four minutes" — followed by a 900-word receipt trail. Two Haryana coaches who had taken my calls for a year stopped answering. I was calm outside and sick inside for a month.

That experience taught me something every wrestling reporter should learn — separate the take from the person. Talk about the structure first, the individual last, and always keep the dates attached. In Sushil's case this matters even more, because the court status must be stated clearly: he is an undertrial, not convicted. But his name will not disappear from Indian wrestling's history and his case is proof of how fragile the balance of power is within the guru-chela tradition and akhada culture.

Core: The mud that never closed

During the empty pandemic summer, when Olympic camps were shut and the Pro Wrestling League had been dormant for a year, I spent my savings crossing at Petrapole and went to 14 akhadas across Jhajjar and Sonipat. There were no crowds anywhere — not in the stadiums, not in the pits. There I watched a 68-year-old wrestler, Om Prakash, running through sand at four in the morning, in mud that had never closed for a pandemic. I made a five-part series, "The Pit Never Closed", narrated in Bengali over Hindi ambient sound.

That series convinced me of one thing: the akhada, not the federation, is the sport's real governing body. Mud, mustard oil and dawn light became my visual grammar. I stopped building coverage from press releases and started budgeting two field trips a year — even in months when the calendar is empty and no editor is asking.

But there is a truth here that must be acknowledged. The romantic image of mud and dawn light is incomplete. Behind the akhada there is also a seamier side — the weigh-in scale, khap politics, the guru's authority that can make or break a chela's career. In a sport where children leave home at twelve, the balance of power is not always equal. And this same imbalance gave birth to the 2026 protest.

Now look at the numbers. India's eight Olympic wrestling medals — six silver and two bronze — are not golden. Not one gold out of eight. The federation often forgets this, and the media repeats it every four years like a slogan. But this is an accounting fact, not a subject for sentiment. Eight medals, zero gold — this is not the shortfall of one wrestler, it is the balance sheet of an entire structure.

After Tokyo 2026 I did something nobody requested. I plotted all eight Indian Olympic wrestling medals on a map. Five of eight came from Haryana, and two of those villages — Nahri and Khudan — are just 41 kilometres apart. I published "Five of Eight", arguing that India's wrestling results are a geography story rather than a coaching story. And the federation has been riding a village pipeline for two decades that it never built and never funded.

Now I attach a geography receipt to every claim: village, district, distance to the nearest SAI centre. This changed how I research — I now follow a wrestler's address before his ranking, and trust a 70-year-old coach's memory over a federation press note every time.

There is another figure worth adding that is often missed. There is no official record of the number of akhadas in Haryana, but according to old estimates from the state wrestling association, there are more than 1,200 akhadas in Haryana alone. Most are private, built on land carved out of farmers' fields, and they receive neither SAI funding nor state government funding. This unorganised structure gives India its Olympic medals and is also the easiest target for political interference.

The two-minute video of 2026 and the Paris loss

In 2026, while finishing my sports-science degree in Barishal — a former 74kg freestyle wrestler who never got past the national quarterfinals — I watched Bajrang Punia lose the 65kg final at the Paris World Championships to Georgia's Zurabi Iakobishvili. Every Indian highlight page filed it as "brave silver". I cut a 2:10 Bengali video from my hostel room arguing that this loss was the most useful thing Indian wrestling produced that year, because it was the first time a top-ten opponent had forced Bajrang off his own feet. The video reached 380,000 views in nine days.

After that day I abandoned balanced recaps and adopted a template that still runs: one falsifiable claim in the first eight seconds, one number in the last five. Scripts dropped from 220 words to 140. And I started a document titled "Consensus I Disagree With", which now holds more than 400 entries.

This method taught me that the biggest enemy of wrestling coverage is the sentimental recap. When every loss is called "bravery", the room for correction closes. If Bajrang's loss had been read as a technical failure then, perhaps his weight management and footwork at 65kg would have been addressed that year, not three years later.

Contrarian: Could I be wrong?

Here I have to challenge my own argument. I said geography is the real story of Indian wrestling and the federation is just riding it. But is that the whole truth?

There is another side — that Haryana's pipeline is also drying up. Land prices in villages are rising, akhadas are being replaced by buildings, and the new generation is moving toward app-based gig jobs rather than wrestling. The generation that grew up in Chhatrasal and the akhadas in the 2010s may prove to be the last. If so, relying only on the akhada and rejecting the federation entirely is a dangerous shortcut. The federation may be corrupt, but it has the system that provides state-level competition, scholarships and international exposure — which the akhada alone cannot provide.

And the second point — which I felt myself in 2026 — is that protest politics and anti-system politics create a new problem of their own. When top wrestlers sit on dharna, their training cycle breaks. After the 2026 protest, several wrestlers' international preparation was affected, and some trials that year were mired in controversy. The fight against the system also has a price, and that price is often paid by the most talented wrestlers.

I wrote nine words about Sushil in 2026 and was sick for a month afterwards. That experience taught me that the sharp frame is not always the right frame. When I make the federation a complete villain, I forget the grey zone in which coaches, officials and wrestlers are all trapped. The balance of power in the guru-chela tradition is fragile, and seeing it only through a saint-versus-sinner lens is the same mistake as calling every loss "bravery".

One more thing I learned: my Bengali-Hindi background, a birth in Dubai and a desk in Dhaka — all of this makes me an outsider on this beat. I use wrestling terminology — kushti, pehelwan, dharna — but this vocabulary can sometimes become a way of covering the authority I have not yet fully earned. So I pick one spelling variant and keep it, gloss the terms for the reader once, and never use Hindi as decoration.

Takeaway: Which mud will the next medal come from?

In 2026, the question for Indian wrestling is not who will win the next Olympic medal. It is which structure the next medal will come from — a court file, a federation election, or the mud that is still getting wet at four in the morning in some village without a camera.

My claim is this: if in the next four years a system is not built to bring the akhadas of Haryana and western UP into the SAI fold and fund them directly, then India's ninth Olympic medal will come from where the last five came from — but the tenth will come from nowhere. Because the day the pipeline dries up, all the federation will have left is a grand election and an empty press release.

So the next time someone claps at a wrestler's medal in a highlight reel, remember — that clip had already reached the mud of an akhada before it reached the highlight reel. And that mud is still waiting for someone to count it, record it in a file, and give it a place in a budget.