How men in Indian sports protect themselves after exploiting women

From the wrestling arenas of Delhi to the cricket grounds of Meghalaya, a familiar script unfolds whenever men in power face charges of harassment: deny, delay, retaliate, cling. Meghalaya’s MCA crisis is the latest, most instructive chapter in this disgraceful story.

The script rarely varies. A powerful man is accused, formally and credibly, of conduct that harms women in his charge. First comes denial. Then the counter-narrative: the accusers are politically motivated, the process biased, the matter a conspiracy. Then there are proxies who are dispatched to defend the indefensible. Then procedural manoeuvres such as committees, legal challenges, and appeals, designed not to find truth but to buy time. Throughout, the man at the centre simply stays put, betting that institutional inertia and public fatigue will do what conscience will not.

India has watched this play out too often. It is time to name it plainly and refuse to normalise it further.

The National Template: Brij Bhushan and the WFI

No episode illustrates this playbook more starkly than the protests of India’s top wrestlers against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then-President of the Wrestling Federation of India. In January 2023, Olympians Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik, and Bajrang Punia walked off the podium at Jantar Mantar, alleging a sustained, documented pattern of harassment against women wrestlers, including juniors, stretching back years.

What followed was a masterclass in institutional self-protection. The government promised an inquiry and asked Singh to step aside; the wrestlers, trusting the promise, called off the protest. Months passed with no action. When they resumed in April 2023, they were met with police batons; Olympic medallists were detained marching towards Parliament.

Singh denied everything and used proxies to run his defence. Sakshi Malik retired in protest; Bajrang Punia returned his Padma Shri. Criminal charges of harassment and stalking were formally framed against Singh in a Delhi court, yet he stayed put for the longest time, making the accusers pay a price for speaking. As Vinesh Phogat put it: if athletes of their stature struggled this hard to be heard, how could an ordinary person feel safe?

A Pattern Across Indian Sport

The WFI case is the most prominent, but far from the only one. Around 2022 to 23, at least five cases of sexual harassment against women athletes were formally recorded in Indian sport, spanning cycling, football, and athletics; each met with denial, delay, and doubt cast on the complainants. The common thread is power: the informal power that lets an official threaten a career with a word, make selections disappear, and ensure speaking up carries a price, in a system that has long rewarded silence and punished truth.

Meghalaya’s Crisis: The Same Script, a Different Ground

Against this backdrop, the conduct of Rayonald Kharkamni, Honorary Secretary of the Meghalaya Cricket Association, must be examined with clarity.

The Meghalaya State Commission for Women is a statutory institution constituted specifically to investigate cases where women have been institutionally and personally wronged. When it held hearings into complaints from members of the MCA Under-23 Women’s Cricket Team, it was doing exactly what it exists to do. Its findings against Kharkamni are formal and on record: negligence and cover-up in handling sexual harassment complaints against women cricketers in his charge. These are not allegations; they are findings, arrived at through proper process.

One would expect such a person to respond with some accountability, an acknowledgment, a resignation, or at least dignified silence and apology. Instead, Kharkamni has chosen to contest the findings rather than reflect on them. Despite being suspended, he continues to conduct internal meetings, mobilise support, and spread misinformation aimed at discrediting those who sought accountability. He is fighting the Women’s Commission, the suspension, his own colleagues; he is fighting the truth.

The matter has now reached the Meghalaya High Court, where the final writ proceedings are pending. Even here, the pattern holds. Kharkamni defied a stay order issued by the MCA’s own Ombudsman and went ahead with an unauthorised General Body meeting notice: conduct serious enough to prompt an interim order nullifying that notice. An interim order of a High Court is not a technicality to be brushed aside; it is a judicial signal, however preliminary, that the conduct in question does not survive scrutiny. Most administrators, on receiving such an order, would pause and take stock. Kharkamni has done neither.

When Accountability Becomes Ego

What is most striking at this juncture is not the persistence of the resistance, which by now is expected. This is no longer — if it ever genuinely was — a contest over process. It has become personal for Kharkamni himself: his standing, his authority, his refusal to be seen losing.

An Ombudsman’s stay defied. A High Court interim order against him. Findings of negligence and cover-up from a statutory Women’s Commission. Any one of these would prompt reflection in a person genuinely committed to the institution he serves. Together, they describe a man who has stopped distinguishing between his own position and the organisation’s welfare; he treats stepping back as humiliation rather than a reasonable response to serious findings against him.

This is the danger. An administrator’s ego, once large enough to override formal findings, statutory commissions, and court orders alike, becomes fundamentally incompatible with fairness. The office, Kharkamni claims authority over, exists in service of players, especially young women who trusted the institution enough to come forward, and it requires a humility that ego of this scale cannot accommodate. A Secretary who treats every adverse finding as a personal affront, and every check on his power as an insult rather than an accountability mechanism, is not fit to administer an association whose core promise is impartial treatment of everyone in its care. Once ego displaces duty, fairness ceases to be possible.

What the Playbook Tells Us

Kharkamni’s playbook is not original; it shares a common architecture with others before it: challenge the legitimacy of the process rather than the finding itself; control the internal narrative through meetings and allies; make complainants the story by shifting attention to motives; and exhaust time, since institutional processes are slow and public memory is short. This is the anatomy of impunity in Indian sports administration; it is how Brij Bhushan Singh kept his position for months, and it is precisely what is playing out in Meghalaya today.

What the MCA and Meghalaya Must Now Do

The MCA’s suspension of Kharkamni is significant, but it is a holding position, not a conclusion. What the institution, the sport, and the complainants deserve is a full, transparent disciplinary process resulting in genuine accountability, not procedural theatre.

The BCCI cannot remain a silent spectator to the governance failures of a state association, given its own policies on preventing sexual harassment and its duty of care to every player, especially those young and dependent on the association for their cricketing futures.

Most importantly, Meghalaya’s women cricketers, who took the costly step of placing their grievances before an independent statutory body, deserve to know it was worth it: the official responsible was held to account, and the sport became safer for those who come after them.

A Message to Those Who Cling

Women do not bring complaints of harassment against powerful men lightly. They do so knowing the risks to their careers, relationships, and reputations, because what was done to them was wrong, and because they believe, against considerable evidence, that institutions can choose accountability over convenience.

When a man in Kharkamni’s position responds to a formal finding of negligence and cover-up, an Ombudsman’s stay, and a High Court’s interim order not with reflection but with wounded pride, he confirms to every young woman cricketer watching that the institution does not have their back: the playbook works, and it is safer to stay silent.

That is a message the MCA, the BCCI, and Meghalaya’s sporting community must refuse to allow. The findings are on record, the suspension is in place, and the High Court has spoken, at least in the interim. The women have spoken, and an independent institution of the State has heard them. The only remaining question is whether the system will finally hold the line, and prove that in a matrilineal society we so cherish, women have a safe place in sport as a career.

The author is a legal consultant and a sports enthusiast. Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue.

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