Weeks after being elected back to power on the strength of the women’s vote, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s shocking act of forcibly removing a woman’s face covering highlighted deeply embedded misogyny.

The assault—there is no other way to describe it—happened during a government event while the woman was being handed an appointment letter as a doctor of alternative medicine (Ayush) in Patna. In the video that has since gone viral, you can see Nitish Kumar holding the letter. He gestures to the Muslim woman to remove her veil but before she can react, he leans forward and yanks it off. The men around him laugh.

Nothing can be more shocking than the assault itself. Touching a woman without her consent, leave alone stripping away a piece of her clothing, is a crime under India’s laws. But there were many who rushed to the chief minister’s defence. Among them was the executive editor of TV9 Network Nabila Jamal, who tweeted that what she saw was a “father figure trying, albeit clumsily, to tell a young doctor that she doesn’t need to hide her face, she belongs there with dignity and equal standing”.

A day later, Union Minister Giriraj Singh also leapt to Kumar’s defence, saying he had done nothing wrong and that the woman should have shown her face. In addition to displaying his own misogyny, hardly a secret, Singh misses the point. The issue is consent. Worse, the chief minister’s action can become a dangerous signal for vigilante mobs to run amok on the street.

Nitish Kumar bucked incumbency at his fourth election with the massive support of his state’s women voters. Just weeks before the polls, he had taken care to deposit ₹10,000 into the bank accounts of 14.1 million women. Now, his legacy of two decades of women empowerment schemes, including the famous free bicycles for secondary schoolgirls, is under threat with the question: Scratch below the surface, and do you see yet another misogynist with a canny knack of using women to win elections?

The misogyny cuts across party lines and individuals. In the state elections following September 2023, when the bill to earmark 33% reservation for women in Parliament and the assemblies was passed nearly unanimously, no party has fielded close to that many women.

This year in Delhi, the number of women elected to the 70-member assembly fell to its lowest in a decade to just five, or 7%. Bihar saw a marginal increase of 29 women in the 243-seat assembly, which at 12% is still a long way off from 33%.

…the more they remained the........

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