A meme about Mamata Banerjee shows why women’s reservation may just be a hollow promise

Representation matters, but until we address the normalisation of linguistic violence, the Women’s Reservation Bill remains a performance on unequal terrain

After the heated debates over the Women’s Reservation Bill or Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (2023), one would expect the national conversation to revolve around representation, policy, and structural reform. Instead, what has unfolded is a spectacle that is loud, predictable, and deeply unsettling. While the ruling establishment links the bill to delimitation and the opposition claims authorship of the 2023 push, the discourse has slipped far below the dignity of democratic engagement.

As the political temperature rises in West Bengal, a disturbing trend has resurfaced with renewed aggression: The vilification of women leaders. The recent circulation of demeaning and sexualised caricatures of Mamata Banerjee is not satire; it is character assassination dressed up as humour. It is not a political critique; it is misogyny, unfiltered and unapologetic.

Reports by organisations such as UN Women and Amnesty International have repeatedly highlighted how women in politics face disproportionate abuse online, with sexualised trolling, threats, and defamation forming a significant portion of attacks. A 2023 study by the Observer Research Foundation noted that Indian women politicians are far more likely to be targeted with gendered disinformation and sexually explicit content than their male counterparts. These are not outlier incidents. They are a pattern.

There is a deeper cultural decay. The normalisation of harsh language as casual, everyday vulgarity evoking mothers and sisters has grown so pervasive that even young children imitate it without hesitation. Linguistic violence has become so commonplace that it no longer qualifies as violence at all. It has turned into ambient, ordinary background noise, making it even more deadly.

Sociolinguistic studies, including those by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, have pointed to the normalisation of gendered abuse in public discourse, linking it to entrenched patriarchal structures where women’s bodies and identities are treated as extensions of male honour rather than as individuals with autonomous dignity. The irony is stark: A society that adorns its walls with countless images of goddesses and recites hymns in their honour with almost theatrical devotion, casually turns the most sacred human relationships — with mothers and sisters — into tools of abuse. Respect, it appears, is reserved for the divine and distant; contempt is reserved for the living and real.

Even more troubling is the internalisation of this mindset. Women, too, are increasingly participating in and perpetuating such language and attitudes, an indication not of empowerment, but of how deeply patriarchy has embedded itself into everyday consciousness. When the oppressed begin to echo the language of oppression, it signals not progress but crisis. It means the values have not merely been imposed from outside; they have been absorbed and are reproduced from within.

Outrage is selective when the target of abuse happens to be a political rival. Solidarity is conditional when standing up for a woman’s dignity requires setting aside factional interests. It is easier to debate who brought the women’s reservation bill first than to confront why women still cannot exist in public life without being objectified. Easier to claim legislative legacy than to ensure the basic dignity of those whose entry into politics the legislation is meant to enable.

In and of itself, this selective silence makes a political statement. It makes clear to women nationwide the value of their involvement, which is encouraged in theory but diminished in reality.

Until that happens, the discussion surrounding women’s reservations will continue to be a performance presented on extremely unequal terrain rather than a real step toward equality.

The bill is important. Representation is important. However, in a political culture that views women’s dignity as optional, contingent, and negotiable, neither is particularly significant.

And so the real question is not whether women will enter Parliament in greater numbers. The question is what kind of Parliament and what kind of country they will be entering.

The writer teaches economics at Dr B R Ambedkar College, University of Delhi