AAP's 'aurat' problem: The patent misogyny of mango men

“(Child and women development minister) Rakhi Birla and (law minister) Somnath Bharti were fighting against prostitution, drug addiction and protection of women,” said AAP leader Sanjay Singh in an unwitting and revealing slip of tongue. Despite the hot counter-accusations of media lies, the fact remains that Bharti’s late night raid in Khirki was indeed against the protection of women.

In the midst of the political melodrama unfolding on Delhi’s streets, watching one AAP honcho after the other make patently disingenuous statements, one unnoticed but important fact became clear: The Aam Aadmi Party is indeed just that. A party for the common Indian man. The aam aurat is an afterthought – useful but ultimately irrelevant.

As women’s rights groups noted in their letter to Arvind Kejriwal , Somnath Bharti’s raid was a brazen, illegal and misogynistic assault on women:

Such a targeting goes against the sense of security and human rights of all women in general, and of single and working women in particular. Television footage of the incident including Shri Somnath Bharti’s own detailed statements, CCTV footage from AIIMS and the complaints by the women themselves, clearly indicate that Shri Somnath Bharti endangered the women and instigated the crowd to violate their human rights, by branding them as prostitutes and asking the crowd to catch them.

Yet the male stalwarts of the party had the gall to pretend otherwise. In his interview with Barkha Dutt , Kejriwal opted for brazen denial, claiming “Somnath Bharti does not have anything against the women” but was upholding the laws against drug and sex trade. He instead kept the focus on the corruption and collusion of the Delhi police, repeatedly shoving the Ugandan women under the rug and out of sight.

The implication of his argument, however, is unhappily clear: It is entirely alright for one group of men to invade the private residence of a woman, drag her out of a car, and force her to take a urine test – without a warrant or any other legal authority – to teach another group of men a lesson. In the AAP worldview, women are not citizens or even human beings in this context, but easy targets to be assaulted, harassed, terrorised, and then brushed aside on national TV. Just collateral damage in the war between AAP and the Delhi police.

Women are not just expendable in the AAP scheme of things, but also conveniently invisible, even fictional, when required. Hence, the AAP leadership opted for that other reliable political trick: blame the media. “The Somnath Bharti incident is a creation of the media. The police botched up the investigation,” said Kejriwal , sounding not unlike Akhilesh Yadav who accused the media of publishing “false reports,” and insisted, “The media should apologise to me, to Netaji (Mulayam Singh, his father) for their reports on Saifai.”

Kejriwal’s tirade in the midst of the dharna – accusing media owners of conspiring against AAP – was just more of the same. AAP may not have learnt how to govern but they certainly learnt the first principle of political spin: bad news is always fake news. No matter how great the crime, how damning the evidence, the trick is to simply refuse to face the facts. It is exactly this audacity that Kejriwal has attacked over and over again, holding press conferences, waving documents and videotapes to damn the mighty. Yet when it was his party’s turn to acknowledge the unpleasant reality of Bharti’s misdeeds, the response was no different or any less shameful. When in doubt, deny, deny, deny. Never mind if it requires denying women their humanity or their rights.

But the worst of AAP’s many gendered sins was the mendacious attempt to reframe the assault on women as a chivalrous attempt to protect them. The centerpiece of this particular travesty is the so-called letter from the Ugandan Commission to the Delhi government. “The Ugandan High Commission wrote to us with an instance of how women are brought to India and forced into the sex trade. They thanked us,” claimed a bare-faced Yogendra Yadav in a press conference, destroying in an instant a lifetime’s worth of credibility. The letter, of course, turned out to be an internal communication to Ugandan intelligence services about a case entirely unrelated to Bharti’s raid or even Khirki.

But why stop there when you are on a roll. Yadav went on to claim , “We also want to make it clear that we treat the accused women as victims of this whole system, and women who are involved in any kind of sex racket are victims of the system and not criminals.” And surely the best way to help such victims – or rather suspected victims, since there is no evidence yet of prostitution – is to harass and intimidate them, and violate their basic legal rights. This is a bit like punching a woman in the face and then preaching against violence against women.

Many have been obsessing about the racism of Bharti’s raid, but to do so is to overlook the patent misogyny embedded within the party’s political strategy. Over the past week, AAP assaulted women for political profit, then denied their crimes in service of expediency, and finally declared themselves protectors of their own victims. This is the aam aadmi party, after all.