Rape of ethics

Rita Bahuguna Joshi hogged the television primetime news with the repeated clip of her Mayawati slur. Obviously! Being a state Congress leader, she said if Mayawati was raped, she would throw Rs 1 crore on her face. Raped? Isn’t loosely using rape as a barb to poke the Uttar Pradesh chief minister beyond the ethics of democracy. On a public platform, Joshi has indulged in the ultimate form of voyeurism. It is almost akin to a woman engaging in the sadistic pleasure of watching another one being raped, and basking amid the agonising screams of the wounded. But there is no trace of remorse on her face. At best, that too, in the fear of losing her membership, she has apologised.
I am not a Mayawati supporter, a megalomaniac that she is. But my sensibility is troubled by the careless use of the term. Rape is probably more gruesome a crime than murder. Physical assault of the body apart, it is an emotional assassination of a woman. But this is the vocabulary of our politicians.
Of course, every channel indulged in its version of voyeurism, repeatedly showing Joshi’s statement and the exact sequence of that’s day’s events. Channel surfers were treated to this "Rs 1 crore byte" throughout the evening as channels went about their "breaking news" exercise!
But why blame the electronic media. The print media has its own way of exposing its gender bias. A newspaper carried the story of Tessy Thomas being appointed project director of India’s most ambitious missile, Agni-V. It said: “Women and nuclear-capable missiles do not go together”. And this was followed by the mother of all patronising cliches: systematically breaking all glass ceilings in the avowedly male bastion of `strategic weapons'. Huh!
And then, another newspaper carried a graphic that depicted West Bengal’s top five administrators in saris, accompanied by a report about the state of inertia in the administration. So inaction makes the administration womenlike, and therefore, the office-bearers were being shown draped in a saree.
Such regressive and patriarchal attitude of the media is, of course, magnified by the extensive use of photographs of insufficiently covered models and actors. Of course, this is for those salivating men. Now there is the modern woman debate here, which I shall deal with in my later blog.