For all the occasionally toxic and personal attacks that mark political exchanges in this country, there is a great unifier in Indian politics that cuts across party lines, draws snickers from all sides and has remained constant over time. It is the male gaze.

In 2005, when Lalu Prasad Yadav, then a minister in the UPA government had claimed that he had made the roads of Bihar, a state he was once the chief minister of, like “Hema Malini’s cheeks”, outrage was largely an “elite” reaction. But his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, across the country, took to the analogy like fish take to water.

BJP’s Kalkaji candidate Ramesh Bidhuri’s comment about Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi takes forward that vile legacy, ironically at a time when one of the pillars of his party’s campaign in the last year’s Parliamentary elections and several Assembly elections preceding and following it, has been women’s empowerment, a pitch quickly adopted by their rivals too.

Neither the veteran actor-MP nor the debutant Parliamentarian are alone. The pervasive misogyny in Indian politics has spared very few, targeting them individually and as a group with only feeble voices of protest here and there.

From Sharad Yadav’s parkati auratein (literally women with wings clipped but derogatorily used for women with short hair) reference during a debate in Parliament on the........

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