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Star caste of hockey

It's impossible to field an Indian hockey team that doesn't reflect the diversity, the united colours, better than any other. Shows that a sport, or a nation, will prosper with growing inclusivity

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Illustration: Binay Sinha

Shekhar Gupta
On the day the Indian women’s hockey team lost the Tokyo Olympics semi-final to Argentina, two men hit the headlines for creating a shameful nuisance of a ‘celebration’ around the home of Vandana Katariya, among the deadliest strikers on display at the Olympics. She also scored the first ever Olympic hat-trick for Indian women’s hockey, in the crucial league match against South Africa that took India to semi-finals.

Why the ugly ‘celebration’ then? Because the men were supposedly upper caste and Vandana comes from a Dalit family. There was also buzz coming out of local media reports that this ugliness was
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