India’s para athletes rewrote history in Glasgow. A 28-member contingent left the 2026 Commonwealth Games with seven medals: three gold, two silver and two bronze, matching everything the country had won across all previous editions of the Games combined.
Somewhere between a landmine on the Line of Control, a motorcycle accident in Roorkee, a polio diagnosis in a Gujarat village, and a sixteen-year-old’s borrowed bicycle in Assam, India scripted the greatest para-sports story in its Commonwealth Games history. Seven medals.Three gold, two silver, and two bronze. A number that sounds modest until you realise it equals everything India had won in every previous edition of the Games, combined. For a 28-member contingent that arrived in Glasgow with more hope than history behind it, that is not just a statistic. It is a generation announcing itself.
A TWENTY-YEAR WAIT, BROKEN
Events for athletes with disabilities first featured at the Commonwealth Games as an exhibition sport in Victoria in 1994. Eight years later, at the 2002 Manchester Games, para athletes became fully integrated into their national teams, making the Commonwealth Games the first truly inclusive international multi-sport event. Since then, India’s returns have been modest: one gold, two silver and four bronze across six editions, seven medals spread over twenty years of trying.
Birmingham 2022 had been the country’s best showing until now, with Bhavina Patel’s gold and Sonalben Patel’s bronze in para table tennis and a third gold from Sudhir in para-powerlifting, which was later stripped after he failed an in-competition dope test.Glasgow rewrote all of it. Para track and field athletes alone brought home six medals, three gold, two silver, and one bronze, while Jhandu Kumar added a seventh in para powerlifting. It also ended a twenty-year wait for an Indian para athletics medal at the Commonwealth Games, the first since Ranjith Kumar Jayaseelan’s seated discus silver in 2006.
THE SOLDIER AND THE CADET
The story that carried India’s flag highest belonged to two men from the Indian Army who, in different ways, ended up somewhere they never planned to be.
Soman Rana grew up in Gaya, Bihar, and was, for a time, one of the country’s finer amateur boxers, finishing fifth at the 2005 National Championships. In December 2006, serving with the Gorkha Rifles along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, a landmine took his right leg. What followed at the Artificial Limb Centre in Pune was not the end of an athletic life but the start of a different one. Introduced to the shot put circle by Colonel Gaurav Dutta at the Army Paralympic Node in 2017, Rana discovered that the throwing motion resonated with his boxer’s shoulders, and he took to it quickly. He went to Tokyo and finished fourth. He went to Paris and finished fifth. Twice he came home a place short of the podium he wanted.
In Glasgow, at 43, he finally got there. A season’s best 13.40m was enough for gold, India’s first-ever Commonwealth Games title in the F57 shot put. “It feels wonderful. I am overjoyed to represent India on such a grand stage and win a gold medal,” he said afterwards, naming his family, the Army, his coach Rakesh Prasad and SAI Bengaluru as the people who had carried him there.
Twelve centimeters behind him stood a story that rhymed with his own. Shubham Juyal, from Roorkee, had wanted to be an Army officer like his father, and had already cleared the written exam for the Army Cadet College entry scheme in 2022, when a motorcycle accident that same year cost him a leg and that plan in one stroke. He, too, found his way to the Artificial Limb Centre in Pune, and there, instead of the vocational rehabilitation on offer, he chose the Army Paralympic Node and a coach named Rakesh Singh Rawat. His throw of 13.28m in Glasgow won silver and completed India’s first one-two finish in the event: two soldiers, two derailed plans, one podium.
THE POWERLIFTER WHO SOLD HIS RICKSHAW
If Rana and Juyal’s stories were written in the army’s rehabilitation wards, Jhandu Kumar’s would have been written on the back of a vegetable cart. The son of a vendor, India’s first medallist of the Games, once sold vegetables for a living and later drove an auto-rickshaw to make ends meet.
