Queen on the board: The Hindu Editorial on R. Vaishali winning the Women’s Candidates tournament

The importance of R. Vaishali profitable the Ladies’s Candidates can’t be overstated. The winner of the gruelling 14-round match, that includes the world’s high chess gamers, will get the best to problem the World champion; now the 24-year-old, who was not among the many favourites in Cyprus, will tackle China’s Ju Wenjun within the World championship later this 12 months. Vaishali is the primary Indian to win the Ladies’s Candidates, which dates again to 1952, and now solely the second Indian to contest the Ladies’s World (classical) chess championship match. She have to be aiming to change into the primary Indian to seize the crown that issues most in ladies’s chess. Apart from Vaishali, Divya Deshmukh additionally performed on the Candidates, although she had a forgettable match, ending seventh in a subject of eight. Divya had made historical past herself final July when she gained the World Cup: she was the primary Indian girl to win that prestigious occasion. It’s exceptional that two younger Indian ladies have gained two of the largest occasions in world chess inside an area of 9 months. And Koneru Humpy had clinched her second World fast championship in December 2024.

However their successes, and the truth that Indian ladies, like the boys, are the reigning World workforce champions (by profitable the Chess Olympiad), the nation can not boast of nice depth in ladies’s chess. Whereas there isn’t any scarcity of recent expertise amongst boys on the Indian chessboard, the story is totally different on the subject of ladies. Ladies like Vaishali and Divya should not merchandise of the system; they’ve succeeded due to their dad and mom, and within the case of the previous, beneficiant company sponsorship has additionally performed a job. Corporates have additionally contributed to the staggering development of Indian chess. The WestBridge Anand Chess Academy (WACA), based by Sandeep Singhal and five-time World champion Viswanathan Anand, ensured that cash was no constraint for Gukesh’s problem for the World title towards Ding Liren in 2024. Indian chess can get solely higher if extra corporates step ahead. To make sure that ladies’s chess retains its momentum, the chess federation ought to give attention to ladies, get them skilled by Grandmasters, and organise extra tournaments for them.