The tough race to the finish line

WHEN you watch your under-rated athletes accelerate past the best runners on the track, like Vithya Ramraj from Coimbatore did in the 4x400m final in the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games this week, first against the Chinese and then the Bahraini girl, you wonder what it means to be the best. Vithya took the baton from Prachi Choudhary, from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, who ran the third leg; MR Poovamma, from Coorg in Karnataka, who ran the second leg, took the stick from Kiran Pahal, the girl from Gumad village in Haryana’s Sonepat district, who ran first, against the sound of the gunshot.

The cliches trickle into your brain, as you watch pure magic unfold in front of you. Muscle and sinew and years of training and a constant ache that pushes you to be the best — all merging into one run, by four women, hailing from unfancied parts of the country.

India’s daughters. Our golden girls. Unity in diversity. North meets South and the differences disappear.

But what do these cliches really mean when these women athletes pit themselves — against their malnutritioned youth, societal pressures, the desperate struggle against poverty, ever-present sexual harassment and the overweening chaos of their everyday lives in the cesspool of small village-small town India — against their dreams, and win?

As these girls were running for their lives in Aichi-Nagoya earlier this week, other daughters of India were protesting on the streets of Delhi against a gang-rape in a park. For those of us old enough to remember the ‘Nirbhaya’ sexual assault in the winter of 2012, it’s as if the years collapsed and we wondered — have things really changed?

To be fair to PM Modi, he’s tried the slogans, from ‘Beti bachao, beti padhao’ to putting money into women’s bank accounts and tweaking government schemes, like Ujjwala gas cylinders, that ensure that women are a priority. Even if many of these schemes are aimed at creating a political constituency of women – at least he hasn’t stopped trying.

So why do women continue to feel as if they don’t matter? Probably because the motive behind these political moves aren’t as pure as they should be. The aim to give 33 per cent reservation to women in Parliament and assemblies is accompanied by so many caveats — the most problematic being the expansion in the number of seats in Parliament and assemblies before the quota is given.

Savita Punia, the women’s hockey goalkeeper who fought off a penalty stroke in the final against China to help win the gold, 1-0, is from Sirsa in Haryana, which in May 2026 recorded an abysmal sex ratio at birth of 883 girls per 1,000 boys — the government recently suspended four medical officers, allegedly for allowing the illegal termination of pregnancies. It’s common knowledge in Haryana that pregnant women travel next-door to Rajasthan to get rid of their female foetuses. (The worst-offending Haryana districts are Gurugram and Jind, at 863 and 872 girls per 1,000 boys.)

Lalremsiami Hmarzote, from Kolasib in Mizoram, scored the winning goal in the women’s hockey final in the 10th minute. Salima Tete, from Badkichapar in Jharkhand’s Simdega district, belongs to a family of Kharia tribals, and captained her team to a stirring finish – Tete says she looks up to former women’s hockey captain Asunta Lakra, who in July charged Hockey India Secretary General Bhola Nath Singh with “sexual harassment and institutional intimidation.” Salima’s golden girls have struck gold, for the first time in 44 years, earning themselves a spot in the 2028 Olympics.

Perhaps the hardest questions are still not being asked of those who don’t want to share power — why don’t you? What is it about women that makes you so afraid?

It is widely known that the southern states, led by Kerala, have the highest sex ratios (Kerala has 1,084 females per 1,000 males at birth), compared to states like Haryana and Punjab (at 898 and 924 females per 1,000 males, respectively), although all three states have approximately the same population, 3 crore.

Here’s an interesting factoid : Kerala has fewer women MLAs, 11 out of 140, in its current Assembly, than Punjab and Haryana, which each have 13 (out of 117 and 90 seats, respectively). And although Kerala has had women MLAs since its first elections in 1957, when the first Communist government in the world was elected under EMS Namboodiripad, its female representation has never crossed 10 per cent.

Meanwhile, a different kind of race is being played out these days in Punjab, in the run-up to Assembly elections in February. The Congress party has a new state chief, Pargat Singh, a former hockey Olympian, hours after former chief Amrinder Singh Raja Warring was chopped off at the knees by the Congress high command in a smooth, bloodless manouevre.

Warring will now go on holiday to London, clearly a destination more charming than Muktsar, his home-town. The rest of the Congress has already moved on, both in gratitude and anticipation — two sentiments that have infiltrated this past week, both across politics and sports.

Home Minister Amit Shah spelled out the latter sentiment, after he paid obeisance at the ancient Devi Talab Mandir in Jalandhar. With anticipation writ large on his face, he told a rally on Thursday that while he hadn’t come to Punjab to talk politics, he promised that the BJP would rid the state of the scourge of drugs “if you vote us to power, once.”

The sparse rally roared back in appreciation, but the powerful BJP leader couldn’t have been happy with the low turnout, especially compared to his Moga rally in March. Some said he arrived about half an hour early and the crowds were still getting there. Punjab BJP leaders privately admit that the several anti-drugs yatras mounted by the party across the state in recent weeks, all of which converged in Jalandhar, hadn’t received the kind of interest they had hoped — in some yatra stops, as my colleague Neha Saini reported from Amritsar, only the 25-30 drugs-afflicted families brought by BJP leaders headlining the rally were present.

All those keenly watching Amit Shah’s speech would have noticed a third thing. He attacked the ruling AAP government in Punjab, and he attacked the Congress party — still the BJP’s chief rival and antagonist across the country, never mind it likes to occasionally cut the ground under its own feet — but he never once attacked the Shiromani Akali Dal.

So what happens now? Which party will first cross the finishing line? The truth is that tiny Punjab is important in the larger political picture because of how it will treat the BJP juggernaut. All eyes now on how it will.