India has a new champion of women. He is loud about it. He wants you to believe it. And he is counting on you to forget everything that came before.

This self-styled champion presides over a party with among the lowest percentage representations of women in Parliament. His time in the prime minister’s office will be remembered for its weaponisation of misogyny. Prime Minister Modi talks of nari shakti and nari vandan and stays mum when convicted rapists are garlanded on their release from prison, when our champion women wrestlers are dragged through the streets for demanding an investigation of their allegations of sexual harassment by a party strongman.

The pattern is not incidental. It flows from an intellectual tradition that has never treated women as political equals. Savarkar, whose portrait hangs in Parliament’s Central Hall, did not merely neglect women’s rights. In Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History, he criticised Shivaji for treating captured Muslim women with chivalry and pointedly asked if Hindu kings should have done otherwise. This is documented, acknowledged by RSS-affiliated publications, and foundational to understanding the arguments that follow.

The ideology sees women’s bodies as the battleground of communal honour. From the targeted abuse of Muslim women on online platforms like ‘Sulli Deals’ and ‘Bulli Bai’ to the vicious trolling and targeting of Lenskart’s Hindu owner for his company’s allegedly anti-Hindu grooming guidelines is a coherent continuum.

A regressive world for women is coded in the DNA of this ideology, which no amount of outward championing of their empowerment can really conceal.

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To understand the depth of this duplicity, one must recall the time India’s democratic conscience was forged — during the freedom........

© National Herald