The politician and the air hostess: A morality tale of amoral India

We’ve seen him in countless Hindi movies. The ruthless politician with his palatial house and posse of gangsters, defined by his unbridled lust for power, money and women. Sadashiv  Amrapurkar made a career playing this guy. And now he’s come to life in the shape of Gopal Goyal Kanda. Where fiction mimicked reality, reality is now returning the favour – confirming that Bollywood caricature is, in fact, all too true to life. Gopal Kanda possesses all the elements of a silver screen neta – including a straight-from-Bollywood fortress in his hometown Sirsa. As for vast amounts of ill-gotten wealth, according to an India Today story (not available online), he owns a Park Plaza hotel, Rs 60 crore shopping area, a high end theme mall, and a luxury residential project. And that’s just in Gurgaon. His other holdings include a Rs 30 crore off-shore casino in Goa and at least 36 companies where he is listed as either the owner or director. And this is the son of a small-town lawyer who started out with a modest shoe factory. [caption id=“attachment_421481” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Geetika Sharma and Gopal Kanda.[/caption] Tehelka’s latest story offers a detailed picture of just how Kanda went from hawai chappal to hawai jahaj. In sum: land, lots of it, in Gurgaon, illegally acquired and sold with the help of an IAS officer and the Chautalas. [Read the article in its entirety here] And then there’s the long list of goonda activity, dating back to his rise as one of Abhay Chautala’s favourite lieutenants. More recent acts of thuggery include firing guns at shopkeepers for calling a bandh; beating up a cricketer, Atul Wassan, for overtaking his motorcade; and shady connection in the gang-rape of a maid in Gurgaon. Geetika Sharma’s suicide provided the missing sordid elements in his track record: illicit sex, abortions, and finally a dead  body. What is perhaps most surprising about the scandal is how unsurprising it is. This is exactly how we imagine our politicians to be: lecherous, amoral, and tyrannical. But what about his victim? A typical middle class girl with upper class aspirations. Much of the media debate has centred on Geetika’s culpability. Surely in this case, she was indeed asking for it, trading sex for upward mobility with a dangerous man.  As one commenter unsympathetically puts it, “Their [sic] is no shortcut to success but she took shortcut so she had to pay!!! 23 year old air hostess became director and VP!!!so was used because she presented herself to get used.” On CNN-IBN’s Face The Nation, advertising filmmaker Bharat Dabholkar offers a more articulate version of this view:

I am making one distinction here because I know millions of women who work very hard morning to night, they look after their families and work for a small sum, and they are not looking to compromise their morals. I know a lot of women who wanted to make their career in entertainment but they were not ready to compromise on their morals. That’s why they haven’t made it. I think we have to make a distinction of exploitation of need – a girl has a need of help for survival and that is why she is giving in. And then there is exploitation that comes out of greed – that ‘I want all the good things very fast.’ I think that distinction is very necessary because I think if it is the exploitation of need then a man has to be blamed. But if it is a exploitation of greed then it is a barter system that is saying that, ‘I’ll give you all the good thing in life for which you have to trade in your body.’

Well, Geetika was barely 17 when she “presented herself,” so to speak, at the MDLR job where she met Kanda. Teenagers rarely exercise the best judgement, and their value systems are still in flux. Surely, we can all remember a shallower version of our younger selves. But what values was she raised on? As India Today notes, the family has no clear explanation as to why they allowed their daughter to travel extensively with Kanda. Not only did they tolerate her close personal relationship with him, but welcomed Kanda into their own home. What were they thinking? Her brother Ankit offers a partly honest answer: “We are a middle class family and when someone as powerful as Kanda visited us regularly and treated us as close relatives, we were affected by his generosity. But we never knew that he had such intentions towards Geetika.” What he doesn’t admit is that Kanda’s so-called “generosity” made it easy to look the other way, to wilfully ignore what was plain to see. And they remain in denial about her sexual involvement, issuing furious denunciations of attempts to smear Geetika’s character. Even as the police is working to “unearth the places where the deceased (Sharma) was made to terminate her pregnancies on various occasions”. Even as details of the terms of employment reveal that she was required to personally report to him every day after work hours. The other sad detail is her monthly salary: Rs 60,000. It seems paltry compensation for sexual servitude. Professer Renuka Dagar underlined the less palatable aspect of the tragedy on Face The Nation:

I think it is a very relevant point that it is not only female alone who is negotiating in this trade off. There are families, friends who allow you this social leeway. They say ‘Ok, if you are going to a reality show, dancing and certain movements, and the sexual talk between the anchor and the lady on the floor, that’s allowed.’ The father is clapping and cheering. But maybe they don’t want it to go to that further step. But I feel it’s not just a matter of extent. The moment you take the body as a point of negotiations, where you are exchanging it for status or celebrity, it’s a trap.

In the movies, the netaji’s victim is always a sati savitri, her innocence loudly telegraphed so as to allow us to fully sympathise with her, and cheer the valiant brother/ husband/ son as he seeks revenge. In real life, neither the victim nor her family is quite as perfect. The outcome, however, is exactly the same. Geetika is just an upmarket version of a Bhanwari Devi. The “shortcut” to success always ends in a dead end, sometimes literally so.  The barter of sex-for-money is rarely an equal one, and only one party has the power to both enforce and scrap the agreement. As Dagar notes:

When the female form become part of this trading ground then repercussions are ugly and deadly for the female gender not just the woman itself. Of course there is a prior background, a larger context.  We do see that there is a premium attached to the female body as a resource…. But when a body becomes a resource to exchange, that’s when the trap springs up. On one hand you have the aspiration to acquire celebrity status through the form of the body. And on the other hand, there are social norms that stigmatise such conduct. When your perceived rights are not realised in reality, you are only left with two options: either you submit or you exit. And in these two cases there has been the exit strategy – that has been through suicide – that has been employed.

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Kanda’s conspicuous corruption is graver and easier to spot. What remains unseen is the venality that has seeped into our veins in the name of “aspiration,” infecting our most cherished dreams, eroding our better selves and judgement. Just like Kanda, we too want that palatial house, BMW, Rolex watch… And we are more easily tempted to trade up or sell out than we care to admit. Corruption is a matter of extent. But the difference between the politician and his victim remains key: only one pays for her sins.