Wolves in feminist clothing, that is the metaphor the latest shenanigans of the ruling party brought to mind. Suddenly people who have not had a passing thought on women’s rights or gender justice all their lives were mouthing endless pieties about “Nari Vandan” and “She-Shakti”.

Tejasvi Surya, BJP leader from Karnataka, stood up in parliament terming the amendment to the 2023 women’s reservation law (the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam) a “genius solution”. We can forgive him his grammar, but has this man, best known for attempting to open an emergency door of an aircraft while it was on the tarmac, had one thought to spare on gender justice before this moment?

Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla castigated opposition leaders for opposing the Bill saying, “Are you against women’s reservation?”, and R.P. Singh, the BJP spokesperson whom no one suspected of harbouring deep thoughts about gender “empowerment”, berates the opposition for letting down India’s women.

Parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju, who did not even bother to convene an all-party meeting to seek a consensus before this special two-day parliamentary session, huffed righteously: “It is the responsibility of everyone to ensure that women get 33% reservation in parliament.”

As for the prime minister, wearing the crown of chief patron of women’s welfare in the country, he warned the opposition during his speech in the Lok Sabha that the women of the country are ‘watching our intent’. He reiterated that thought in a tweet he sent out the next day:

“On behalf of our Nari Shakti, I also request all members not to do anything that may hurt the sentiments of women across India. Crores of women are watching us … our intent and our decisions. I once again request that everyone support the amendments to the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam.”

Television channels took this narrative to heart. If Times Now had wasted any television minutes on women, it was on what it termed as “power women”. Its summit of 2026, for instance, had space only for “Influential Indian Women”. But when the Modi government suddenly re-engineered the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, which presumably includes ordinary women, there was a miraculous change in its narrative. Headlines now screamed: ‘Nari Shakti … When Women Lead, Nations Rise’; ‘She-Shakti for Bharat’; ‘Historic Women’s Quota Bill’.

In fact, every television channel in the country competed with each other to amplify BJPfeminism. They reeled out the evidence of the ruling party’s undying concern for women, naming government programmes like ‘Lakhpati Didi’ and ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’ to drive home their point.

They forgot however to mention that ‘Lakhpati Didi’ was just the old self-help programme dressed up in new clothes; that the Drone Didi programme did not take off; that the Mudra Yojana was aimed solely at benefitting ambitious, well-networked “female entrepreneurs”; and as for ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ it has been reduced to a slogan painted on the backs of passing trucks and autorickshaws.

The fact is that crimes against girls have touched exponential levels, especially in the Hindi heartland. Horror stories involving young female lives have kept surfacing, whether it was the gang rape of an eight-year-old in Kathua in 2018 or the 19-year-old Dalit woman set upon by the Thakur men in her village in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, in 2020.

So are our betis really getting saved? Not really. Meanwhile the Uttar Pradesh government recently allegedly moved to abolish 27,000 basic schools in the name of ‘improving educational efficiency’, which also means that the beti padhao part of the slogan is in danger of being rendered meaningless.

If the media were to do their job, they would have called out this elaborate charade of gender concern just for purposes of passing three Bills, by reminding its readers and viewers of the innumerable anti-women jibes made by the prime minister himself, from early ones like calling Sonia Gandhi a Jersey cow and Sunanda Pushkar as Shashi Tharoor’s ’50-crore girlfriend’, to more recent slurs like mocking Mamata Banerjee repeatedly by calling out “Didi O Didi”.

If criticising the prime minister is a bridge too far for these media houses, they could have at the very least checked out how women have fared in India during the Modi years. The grave reality is that the overall number of crimes against women per 1,00,000 increased from 56.3 in 2014 to 66.4 in 2022.

The sheer audacity of a government with such a legacy now claiming to be champions of women’s empowerment should have been laughed out of court by the media. Instead they rushed to promote the government’s chief spokespersons in every way they could.

When Amit Shah was speaking, the kicker line claimed (without evidence) that his words had stumped the ‘Kill Bill Group’ (CNN News18). They clung like barnacles to the hull of the Mother Ship, hoping much like barnacles did to get a stable surface to live out the duration of their adult lives even if the price for doing so was being obliged to parrot the government line on every issue including the present one.

The Constitution (131st Amendment Bill) was........

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