4 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Mar 20, 2026 08:54 AM IST
A senior Navy officer has questioned the selection of an Army boxer over the Navy’s pugilist in the Indian squad for the upcoming Asian Championships in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
The 10-member squad for the March 28-April 11 Asian meet includes nine Army boxers — the tenth is a boxer from Rajasthan, not from the defence services. The Navy’s Hitesh Gulia lost out to the Army’s Deepak in the 70-kg category.
In a letter to Secretary (Sports) Hari Ranjan Rao, a Vice Admiral in charge of personnel-related matters has alleged that the selection committee appointed by the Boxing Federation of India (BFI) had two members from the “same organisation whose athletes were competing for selection”, thus raising concerns about “conflict of interest” and “perceived lack of neutrality”.
The letter states that Gulia had got the better of Deepak at last year’s Inter-Services Championship as well as the 2026 Nationals.
“Despite this demonstrated superiority and international medal record, Gulia has been placed below Deepak,” writes the Vice Admiral. Expressing concern about the BFI’s selection process, he alleges that it “lacks open selection trials” and also raises “non-availability of video recording of bouts”.
Denying the allegations, BFI Executive Director Colonel Arun Malik has claimed that apart from the men’s head coach, CA Kuttappa, nobody from the Army was part of the selection committee.
“There is no one in the selection committee from the Army. Even Kuttappa retired many years ago,” Malik told The Indian Express.
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He said the men’s head coach, who is in his third stint, had also worked with Beijing Olympics bronze medallist Vijender Singh. “You can’t say that if the coach is from the Army, we can’t put him in the selection committee,” Malik said.
Kuttappa did not respond to questions on the issue.
Malik said there wasn’t much of a difference between Gulia and Deepak, and it’s in the Federation’s interest to pick the best boxer available.
“I and my team would be stupid to pick sub-standard people just because we want to pick somebody specific,” said Malik. “Deepak, in this weight category, during the assessment, outperformed everybody in all sparring sessions.”
In his letter, the Vice Admiral has requested the Sports Secretary to intervene and consider a review of the selection process where “… performance in national and international competitions as well as head-to-head results received appropriate weightage”.
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He has pointed out that a similar assessment of players before the 2024 Paris Olympics resulted in “Indian boxing returning without a medal”.
Meanwhile, the BFI, in a statement, defended its selection process. Denying the charge about lack of video recordings, it said all matches were “duly recorded and recordings were shared with the Sports Authority of India”. It added that it was not standard practice to share bout recordings with the boxers or their camps.
It also said that sparring bouts held during assessment were not considered competitive and the purpose was to evaluate, rather than pick a winner or a loser.
“These are not competitive bouts but structured sparring sessions conducted as part of an evaluation framework. The purpose of these sparring rounds is not to declare winners or losers, but to assess athletes across multiple performance parameters,” it said.
