Thread by @vsirnate

#KanganaRanaut takedown. Sorry I am triggered

She needs to understand @IJaising is not against capital punishment for Nirbhaya’s rapists specifically. She has a moral objection to the idea of capital punishment by itself. This DOES NOT mean that she has sympathy for rapists.

That may be a complicated argument for Kangana to understand but it’s the truth. You can’t make a leap from one to thousand without taking a breath, which is what she’s done. She’s assuming that support for capital punishment in this SPECIFIC case means someone is sympathising

with rapists. This is just not what was being said at all.

Second, let’s put aside the the fact that Kangana doesn’t understand nuanced arguements. It is #NewIndia, there are very few people left who understand nuanced arguments.

The more insidious part of what she has said is to basically fully reveal herself as a carrier of patriarchy. Let me tell you something about how I have suspected this about her for many years. I don’t watch a lot of Bollywood films so I didn’t know who she was. Then an interview

she did wearing this toga style outfit went viral and I was impressed. But then a very good friend pointed out some oddities about her and slowly over the course of a year I was convinced all was not right.

However the media kept putting her in spots where she kept appearing as a champion of women’s rights. People like Barkha Dutt kept building her up. My friend and I just couldn’t see why. And we go mostly by gut instincts on people. This actress even had me fooled for about a year

So the insidious thing she has said is about rape culture. She casually remarks that a very senior female lawyer should be Locked in with four rapists. It is absolutely the worst thing to say to any woman. This basically confirms everything for me. Some Women enforce

patriarchy more effectively and rabidly then men. Kangana is one of those women. Their solidarity with women is nonsense, they have made a bargain with male supremacy which benefits them and gets them closer to the flow of power in a society.

Third, Kangana has a very well developed siege mentality- it’s her against the whole world. This is also something she has displayed time and again. She says stupid things, people attack her, then she plays the victim and misogyny card and says some woke stuff about feminism,

and gets some panel or tv interview from the mainstream media to legitimise her. This has happened so many times, I’m wondering why people even ask her questions anymore. None of her answers which are spontaneous , look good or make sense.

Finally, this thing she said about rapists that come from the wombs of women like our senior lawyer. This is the kind of language that is patriarchally conditioned. Anyone with a BA in sociology will tell you rapists aren’t born, they are made by society.

Damn I have whole pieces on this in The Wire and The Telegraph. So to say that certain women give birth to rapists, is not insulting to rapists at all. In fact her language exonerates them from any blame for being rapists but saying that their rapey behaviour was predetermined by

their mothers during gestation and at birth. This is not the language of an empowered and educated feminist. It is the language of a woman who still thinks in male vernacular.

She can mimic the language of empowerment but that’s because it’s a saleable commodity. Her true self lies in these unscripted moments. Don’t be fooled by that righteous anger against rapists on display. Her real target here was another woman, not the rapists. #rapeculture

This mimicking of the language of female empowerment is also a topic I’ve addressed somewhere in my writing. I talked about those WhatsApp forwards which one gets on Mother’s Day etc or laxmi Puja, where all empowerment becomes performance over a WhatsApp msg.

Mark my words Kangana is another Kishwar in the making. I remember a time when Kishwar used to be invited to lSR and sell her magazine Manushi. We all thought she was a feminist. And then when I became active on Twitter I realised how wrong we all were.

Update: I didn’t realize people were going to pay heed to my words here so thank you. Here is a piece where I have argued why death penalty for rape is a bad idea because it awards a death sentence to rape victims as well.

thewire.in/women/death-pe…

I will add that I wrote this piece in 2018 and recently it has been revealed that what I predicted was correct. Apparently rape cum
Murder has increased in India. It was exactly what I was afraid of.

This is a piece where I wrestled with why women were being attacked in particularly horrible ways in India.

m.telegraphindia.com/opinion/manufa…

In this piece I raise the questions of why Indian society supports death penalty and what this says etc. this is also the piece where I broke the calculation that 98 percent of rapes in India were done by known persons. NCRB later confirmed it but think used a different year for

Calculation and revised the percentage down to 94%

thehinducentre.com/the-arena/arti…