Williams's success is… ours?

A day before NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were to return onboard a SpaceX crew capsule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi published a letter in which he said he had inquired after her when he met U.S. President Donald Trump and that even if “you are thousands of miles away, you remain in our hearts”.

Union Minister of State Jitendra Singh declared “a moment of glory, pride and relief” when Williams, whom he called “this illustrious daughter of India”, splashed down in Florida Bay. He lauded her “for the courage, conviction and consistency with which she endured the uncertainties of space”.

If one had only Singh’s note to read, one may not have realised another person, Barry Wilmore, endured what she had or that there were two other astronauts in the capsule when it descended. Yet Singh’s peers, including Jyotiraditya Scindia and Piyush Goyal, also published similar posts on their LinkedIn profiles extolling Williams alone. Scindia even thanked the other two astronauts “for rescuing our brave warriors of the space”. ISRO chimed in as well.

Williams was born in Ohio to Indian and Slovene American parents; her father emigrated from India in 1958. As such, she lived, studied, and worked all in the US. While the extent to which she is “Indian” per se is debatable, self-identity is personal and ultimately for Williams to determine.

In the last half year, however, many news reports in the mainstream press have referred to her as being of “Indian origin” or as “Indian-American”. Labels like this are poorly defined, if at all; writers and authors typically use them on the basis of a pulse or a sentiment. Are they accurate? It might seem that it does not matter whether a minister refers to Williams as a ‘woman of India’, that there is no price to pay. But there is.

In and of themselves, the pronouncements about Williams are not problematic. They become that way when one recalls what has been given to her, and by whom, that has been denied to many others, some arguably more deserving. An example from recent memory is wrestlers Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik, whose peaceful protest to reform India’s professional wrestling administration was quelled violently by police acting on orders of the Union government. They were not “India’s daughters” then.

The year after, in 2024, when Phogat was disqualified from participating in the finals of the 50-kg wrestling event at the Paris Olympics, the immediate reaction was to allege a conspiracy, blame her for not trying hard “enough”, and to ask whether she had let Indians down even though the prime minister had “let” her participate despite her role in the protests.

There was no meaningful discussion or dialogue in government circles about systematically averting the circumstances that saw Phogat exit the Olympics, instead it seemed to grate that she had come so close to a monumental success yet still missed out.

The chief minister of Haryana, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre, celebrated Phogat’s return to India as if she had had a podium finish, arranging for merriment on the streets of her home state. It was an attempt to paper over his peers’ accountability with sound and fury.

Williams occupies a similar liminal space: as Phogat had lost yet not lost, Williams was not Indian yet Indian — both narratives twisting the lived realities of these women in the service of a common message: that India is great. Williams’s feats in the space and spaceflight domains have been exceptional, but neither more than other astronauts who have gone to space on long missions nor because India had any role in facilitating it.

Presumably in response to an excellent article by Chethan Dash at The Times of India, Singh said on March 19 that the government had not arranged for India’s own astronaut-designates — the four men in the shortlist to pilot Gaganyaan’s maiden crewed flight — to have conversations with the press and the public at large, at a time when an exceptional number of people were interested in Williams’s life and work. The government had clearly missed an invaluable opportunity to build interest in the Indian space programme. Its excuse did not wash either: that the astronauts had to not be “distracted”.

The loud and repeated bids to coopt Williams’s success as India’s by extension has been disingenuous, a continuing pattern of crusting the shell with as many jewels as possible to hide the infirmity within.