K. C Lithara, a promising young Indian basketball player was found dead in her flat in Bihar on the 26th of April 2022. Belonging to a socially and economically deprived family, Lithara had been working in the Indian Railways for the past eighteen months, whose journey to reach the national scene of the Indian basketball was a hard one. The instantaneous media reports conclusively stated her death as suicide including the major national dailies. Later, a police case was registered based on a complaint lodged by her family alleging the involvement of her male coach for mentally and physically abusing her and for forcing towards this untoward incident. As months pass, her mother who suffers from cancer and father, who is a daily wage labour are awaiting justice amidst the usual narratives of ‘ongoing investigation’.
Building an analysis based on this instance (and a few others) as one among many unnoticed episodes of its kind in which the case investigation is at a stand-still, this paper seeks the possibility of anchoring “Restorative Justice” as a conceptual frame in studying specific sites in Indian sport. As Indian women (women from rural and lower caste backgrounds in particular) find it hard to reach the national level of sport given the nature of social structure that is quintessentially patriarchal. The relative absence of the restorative justice discourse in the administrative and governance vocabulary and policy structures exacerbates this predicament and makes the lives of women and lower caste athletes more vulnerable and hazardous.
