Seventeen Without Sehrawat: The Name Nobody Printed at Ahmedabad's First Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship

Last Wednesday, close to midnight, on a borrowed phone on a Rangpur balcony, I was looking at a list of seventeen names. The headline spoke not of names but of absence: Pawan Sehrawat is not there. By habit I counted the missing name first, then asked myself the harder question — where is the report on the one whose name never even made a list? Three days of scrolling made one thing clear: at least six outlets ran headlines on the men's probables, yet if the same federation announced a women's kabaddi squad, it would not get a single line of space. I learned to count the women in the stands before I counted the goals; this time the habit turned in a different direction.

Two stories have to be read together. The first: the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India has announced a 17-member probable squad for the inaugural Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship, to be held in Ahmedabad, India, from 21 to 31 October 2026. The second: not one of those seventeen features in the list of the twelve players who won Asian Games gold. Sehrawat's omission is therefore not an isolated incident but the most visible face of a larger decision.

For readers who have never watched kabaddi, two lines of grounding are needed. The attacking player is the raider; within thirty seconds he enters the opponent's half and scores by touching a defender and returning safely to his own half. When defenders collectively stop him inside their half, that is a tackle, and it also scores. The raider must chant kabaddi kabaddi throughout; if the chant breaks, the raid is void. A bonus line sits deep in the opponent's half — crossing it earns an extra point, but on condition. When an entire side is ruled out, two points follow and the whole team revives — that revival is the real drama of the sport. And after two consecutive scoreless raids, the third becomes do-or-die; fail again and the raider himself is out.

At international level this is Standard Style, seven against seven, two twenty-minute halves. It is not the circular kabaddi played in Punjabi villages. This is the code India has effectively monopolised for decades. Leaving twelve gold medallists out of a seventeen-man pool is therefore first a signal of confidence, and only then a question mark.

Being a first edition is no small thing here. With no previous edition there is no established norm for squad building and no reliable read on opponent quality. A federation that does not know who stands opposite will not put its most valuable players at risk. The selection logic follows: this is a lower-competition stage, so testing depth rather than hoarding experience is the sensible move.

But this is exactly where the real analytical trap hides. Was Sehrawat among those twelve Asian Games players? The announcement never says. If he was, his omission is merely part of rotation — rest, load management, room for newcomers. If he was not, the matter is entirely different: it is less a case of resting someone and more a conscious decision to drop a star. The report leaves that question hanging, and it is precisely from that hanging space that the headline drama is manufactured.

The two explanations offered in the report are also telling — first, that India has so many capable players that they deserve a chance; second, that those who have already played internationally deserve rest. Both are reasonable, but neither is an official federation statement; both are the reporter's interpretation. The rest argument is technically strong. If the gap for recovering from the Asian Games is tight, raiders who absorb heavy physical load have no route other than rotation.

One structural fact deserves separate mention. Leaving every gold medallist out of the seventeen-man probable squad means India is taking a stock-take of its depth, and the testing ground chosen is an informal, first-edition event. That these two decisions were made together is no coincidence. If this tournament were the team's biggest stage, the stars would be on the probable list.

The word Commonwealth, however, creates some excess expectation. Fourteen nations are mentioned, but kabaddi is not widely played across the Commonwealth. In reality most of those fourteen are probably South Asian Commonwealth members — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore — with the rest being diaspora-heavy nations such as England, Australia and Canada. How much genuine competitive depth sits behind that number was not verified in the report.

That is why the question of Iran's participation matters so much. In Standard Style, Iran is India's only genuine challenger. If they come to Ahmedabad, this tournament is at least a test. If they do not, the figure of fourteen nations stays a mere figure, and the event becomes a large gathering of diaspora kabaddi.

Now to the side few are discussing, which is in fact the biggest gap in this story. The headline is turning a star's absence into traffic, while the squad itself is being built without stars — that gap is the true picture of kabaddi journalism today. Traffic value and pitch value are pulling in opposite directions here, and nobody is writing the pitch value.

I first saw this imbalance at close range in 2026, in Rangpur. The district round of the newly launched Bangamata Gold Cup was drawing sixteen teams and almost no press. With a borrowed handset and a tripod I streamed nine matches on Facebook Live, and the total barely reached four thousand two hundred views. A fifteen-year-old forward from Gangachara beat two defenders for a goal, and that clip was shared nine hundred times. The pitch was there before the coverage was. I just brought the phone.

A year later, in June 2026, Bangladesh beat India by three wickets in the Women's Asia Cup T20 final in Kuala Lumpur, eighteen-year-old Nahida Akter taking 3/21. I watched it in a Rangpur cafe while every other television in the room carried the Russia World Cup. Sixty-four men's matches across eleven Russian cities against twenty-three women's matches on a single regional feed — I put those two numbers side by side and wrote a six-thousand-word piece. In Kuala Lumpur the World Cup ran behind us like a second heartbeat, yet beside the scoreboard nobody recorded our wins and losses.

These experiences say plainly that however much noise the seventeen names from Ahmedabad generate, the women's probable squad deserves exactly as much. Because the future of the game is decided in two places — outside the court in the stands, and inside it in the hands of players whose names the media has still not learned to write. A borrowed phone taught me that access is not a luxury; access is a reporting tool. By the same logic, printing a woman kabaddi player's name is not charity, it is ordinary journalism.

The Bangladesh context is unavoidable here. Our own kabaddi reality is a smaller version of this tournament — plenty of players, few opportunities, and coverage amounting to a few lines a year. Where even the men's domestic league struggles to find sponsors, spending a separate line on women's kabaddi still feels like a luxury to our reporters. Yet the numbers on the ground say the opposite: girls are playing, not stopping. Nobody is simply counting.

Here an uncomfortable point must be made. The protagonist of this story is not a team but a federation with a past history of election disputes and loss of recognition. Seventeen names were announced, but the selection criteria were stated nowhere. As long as that question hangs, the space for rumours about why Sehrawat was dropped stays just as large.

The lack of transparency is not only a matter of principle but of practice. Publishing selection criteria is the cheapest way to defend one's own decision. When that is not done, what follows is visible in this very headline: ten players' names become unprintable, and one star's absence becomes the entire story. That is unfair to those who may have sweated twenty years for this chance.

Still, dismissing this competition as mere politics or branding would also be wrong. The value of a first-edition event is measured on two scales — how much competition on the pitch, and how much continuity in the institution. The first is doubtful, the second promising. India wants to make the institutional home of this tournament its own, and if that succeeds, the claim for kabaddi's entry into the Commonwealth Games advances a step. That is not mere fantasy, but it is not yet proven fact.

Over many years of watching matches I have developed one habit: looking at the stands gives more information than looking at the scoreboard. Kuala Lumpur in 2026, Rangpur in 2026, the long nights of empty stands in 2026 — everywhere I have seen that the attendance count speaks more honestly than the result. Ahmedabad should be watched the same way. Who comes, who counts, and whose name gets printed — the answers to those three questions will tell whether the tournament really changed anything, or merely became a good photograph.

Personally, I see this event as the first step of a long run, not a sprint. A first edition never changes anyone's fate; continuity does. Once is news, five times in a row is an institution. In that sense Ahmedabad 2026 is really a question — can kabaddi build a multi-edition international calendar, or will it stop at one round of pomp? And the answer depends largely on people beyond those seventeen, looking in from the stands.

Finally, one simple question is not being asked. If the first Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship can truly change kabaddi's future, where are the women in that future? The men's seventeen names are on the front page today; if a women's squad is announced, will it get at least a dateline? The final's trophy always reaches the camera first. But only when we learn to write first the names of those who stand around it — the mother, sister, daughter in the stands, and the woman waiting to step onto the pitch — will kabaddi journalism truly begin to become international. The pitch was there before the coverage was; now someone just has to pick up the phone.