Scandals & Feuds ·
Delhi Court Closed POCSO Case After Wrestler Retracted Allegations
The court’s May 26, 2025, acceptance of a police cancellation report closed the former minor complainant’s case against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh—not the separate case brought by adult wrestlers.
The wrestler was in court on May 26, 2025, when a judge at Delhi’s Patiala House Courts accepted the police report seeking to close her sexual-harassment case against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the former Wrestling Federation of India chief. She had been a minor when the alleged offences occurred and was by then an adult. She had retracted her allegations, and neither she nor her father opposed the police request for cancellation.
The case arose from one of two first information reports registered by Delhi Police in April 2023. One concerned the minor complainant and invoked the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act alongside provisions of the Indian Penal Code. The other concerned allegations by adult wrestlers. The May 2025 decision closed the POCSO case, not the adult wrestlers’ case.
In a later statement before a magistrate, the wrestler no longer alleged sexual harassment by Singh. Her father also said that he had filed a “false” complaint, attributing it to anger and frustration over what he regarded as the federation chief’s biased treatment of his daughter.
On June 15, 2023, Delhi Police submitted its cancellation report. It said investigators had found “no corroborative evidence” for the allegations. Police said the request was based on statements from the wrestler and her father. The request did not itself close the case; the court still had to decide whether to accept it.
During the proceedings, the wrestler and her father expressed satisfaction with the investigation and raised no objection to the report. The court also held in-camera hearings to determine whether she had retracted under duress, according to the Hindustan Times. Nearly two years after police submitted the report, Additional Sessions Judge Gomti Manocha accepted it.
At the time, the separate case involving adult wrestlers was still at trial, with prosecution witnesses being examined. Singh had challenged those proceedings in the Delhi High Court, calling the case against him “false” and “frivolous” and alleging a biased investigation. Those were his assertions, not findings disposing of the adult complainants’ allegations.
For the wrestlers pursuing that separate case, the distinction was immediate. After the POCSO closure, Bajrang Punia told the Hindustan Times: “Our main case of sexual harassment against Brij Bhushan is still going on in court and he has not been let off from that.”