It’s far too late in the day to say - “Mind your language’. The political discourse has been getting progressively worse as the clock ticks on the general elections. Not that it wasn’t coarse enough in the last four years or so from when the debate has been raging between the ruling party on one side and the liberals across the left-right divide. It’s just that a sense of nervousness has been creeping into everyone as the polls loom.
The poll pitch probably hit its lowest point last week when someone in the ruling camp suggested that Rahul was an underperformer in a certain aspect of life and promptly somebody else in the Congress alliance camp dragged the name of the Prime Minister into this discussion. The political discourse was terribly eroded by this exchange of insults, so needless it’s not funny.
Divisions have become so sharply delineated in the current political scene that no word is thought too demeaning to use in dragging down a politician from the other side. What is worse this poll season is the exchanges have been made intolerable by a whole load of misogyny slipping in. Women have probably never been so widely disparaged as in the 2019 campaign. In history, one or two women may have given it back in style, but in the most modern era, they are the sitting ducks taking all the hits.
Take the Samajwadi leader Firoz Khan who said “Giver her ghungroo and watch her move. Rampur’s evenings will turn colourful in this election season,” in adverting to the actress Jaya Prada entering the poll fray on the other side of the divide after having crossed over to the BJP. An old SP favourite in the days when Amar Singh was ruling the roost in Mulayam’s time, Jaya Prada has been at the receiving end of typical coarse language more heard at water tap discussions among harried people waiting for their turn to capture the precious resource in pots and pans.
There is no use pointing fingers at one side or the other as both have been embroiled in this unseemly war of words long before sexist netas began lacing the war of words with epithets aimed at the women. All this calumny as political point making may be traced back to Sonia Gandhi baiting Narendra Modi with her infamous ‘Mauth ka Saudagar’, circa 2007. Modi may have suggested that everyone was conspiring with Pakistan to stop him becoming PM, but he was not inclined to take up the challenge in such a direct manner even though he has given back in equal measure on members of the ‘dynasty’ in roundabout ways.
All the old sense of humour like the reference to the need for roads “as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks” seems to have evaporated. References to women are now horrendously misogynistic. And SP is not the only culprit, maybe their idiom makes them repeat offenders in the lowly art of demeaning women. Azam Khan once wondered why “You made a dancer a MP.” Not that the misogyny was spared in Tamil Nadu either where respect for women politicians is somewhat higher after many terms of Jayalalithaa rule.
The DMK member Nanjil Sampath declared that he does not know whether the Puducherry Lt Governor Kiran Bedi is a man or a woman and this was the reference point in many TV debates on netas having a free run with their sexism. Someone else makes an unprintable-in-a-family-newspaper kind of comment on Mayawati. Another makes public the observation that Priyanka Gandhi is “beautiful, but not talented.”
The need to make public this kind of judging women by their looks might not arise if not for politics. But then who are men to say that women cannot come into the political arena, particularly in a country famous for men genuflecting in front of the likes of Indira Gandhi and Jayalalithaa. They had taken this fine art to such heights that pictures of CM Jaya driving out of the Secretariat would be embarrassing for any man to look at, not because men were the ones doing the genuflecting but because the need to be so publicly submissive is indeed questionable.
Women have been pouring out their angst but can they even get men stop for a minute to ponder whether what they are doing is right. It does appear strange that men should feel so threatened by women in politics that they must heap insults on them like this. Does this public exposition of misogyny win them votes? The alternate question to ask is whether all this is a clever diversionary tactics by netas of all parties to keep out the major issues facing the nation. Whatever be the results of the polls, men have managed to shame themselves at the hustings with their chauvinism.
