MCPs R Us: How We Put Down Women and Feel OK About It

Opinion

While the blogosphere spins furiously over BarkhaGate, the Radia tapes, and every other buzzword of the season, we seem to be conveniently forgetting the difference between the powerful and their alleged order-takers.

Take Niira Radia. Her supposed crime is that she is a lobbyist — and, unfortunately for her, a good one. All she was doing was representing her clients to the best of her abilities. She was not the powerful one here. She could not have offered money or any other inducement unless her clients were willing to pay to play. She was a lobbyist — and, dare we say, not the first one in India. There are any number of ex-generals, IAS officers, politicians, judges, and journalists hired by corporate houses. Except that they are called "professional advisors."

Notice the script. The woman who arranges access is a schemer, a manipulator, a spider at the center of a web. The men who paid for the access — the industrialists whose fortunes rode on the outcomes, the politicians who took the calls — are treated as the scenery. The lobbyist is the story; the clients are the context.

The same script ran on the journalism side. The tapes caught several journalists in conversation with Radia, but the public fury fixed overwhelmingly on one name: Barkha Dutt. Her career, her credibility, her motives were dissected for weeks. The male journalists on the tapes received a fraction of the moralizing. The question of what the tapes actually revealed — a media-political nexus in which access journalism had quietly become the business model — was drowned out by the more satisfying question of which woman to blame.

This is the oldest trick in the scandal playbook: personalize, feminize, and thereby contain. If the story is about a scheming woman and a compromised anchor, it is a story about individuals. If it is about the system — the clients, the politicians, the proprietors, the whole economy of influence — it is a story about us. And that story, we prefer not to read.

Male chauvinism is not just about who gets the jobs. It is about who gets the blame. In the Radia tapes saga, the women got the blame, the men got the footnotes, and the system got away clean. We should be embarrassed — but somehow, we feel OK.