- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
RANI Rampal, the captain of the Indian women’s hockey team that finished fourth at Tokyo Olympics, on Saturday (7) lashed out at the “shameful” racist abuse that the family of one her colleagues faced recently. She said it was damaging the country’s quest to boost its sporting image.
“It’s such a bad thing,” Rampal told reporters.
“We put our life and soul into it, struggle and sacrifice so much to represent our country and when we see what is happening — what happened to Vandana’s family — I just want to say to people please stop this religious division and casteism,” the 26-year-old forward said.
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“We have to rise above this. We come from different religions — Hindu, Muslim, Sikh — and come from all parts of India — north, south and east — but here we work for India,” Rampal added.
Rampal, who also hails from a humble background as her own father pulled a cart to feed the family, said, “We sweat it out for the Indian flag and it is such a shameful thing when we see that people behave like this.”
“This should never happen to any athlete, or a normal person.”
Man held for hurling racial abuse at Indian woman hockey player
India made a massive turnaround in hockey, a sport which it had dominated once on the international stage with eight golds in the Olympics, at Tokyo by bagging the bronze in the men’s category and narrowly missing a medal in the women’s category. The Indian eves lost to Argentina 1-2 in the semi-finals and 3-4 to Great Britain in the bronze-medal game despite taking leads at one point. Their fourth-place finish equalled their performance in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.
The men’s team, on the other hand, won a medal at the Olympics after a gap of 41 years.
But the joy was marred when the family members of Vandana Katariya, an ace player of the women’s team who scored a hat-trick at Tokyo, were insulted over their Dalit (earlier called “untouchables”) origin, something that still plagues the Indian society.
Some men taunted the family at their home in the northern state of Uttarakhand saying the women’s team could not win a medal because there were too many Dalit players in it. Katariya’s family also said that it was being threatened. Some people were arrested by the police on the basis of the family’s complaint.
Katariya, who scored four goals in all in the tournament, also criticised the incident saying the abuse had tarnished India’s achievement in hockey.
India is home to some 200 million Dalits who are regularly targeted by upper-caste people by means of discrimination and deadly abuse.
