People Tweeting from Glass Houses

Shobhaa De and a few observations on cheap personal attacks

In the case of Raj Thackeray, Nitesh Rane and Sanjay Raut versus Shobhaa De over her tweet—‘Maharashtra and Mumbai??? Why not? Mumbai has always fancied itself as an independent entity, anyway. This game has countless possibilities’—what is interesting is how it subtly shifted shape from regional jingoism to feminist gripe. Barkha Dutt, on an NDTV show, asked Rane whether a tweet by him on De was not “obnoxious and sexist”. During the show, along with a mug shot of Raj Thackeray, they also ran his comment on De, ‘It’s not Quite As Easy as Getting a Divorce’, under the heading ‘Maximum City, Maximum Misogyny’.

Let’s ally ourselves with De over a few things. She wrote the tweet as irony, accepted. There was no intention to offend, accepted. There is no need to apologise, accepted. The things said against her were intimidatory, accepted. She was targeted because she was a woman, not so easy to accept.

For instance, Nitesh Rane’s tweet—‘Rather than twitter, Shoba De shud say the same thing on the streets of Mumbai openly after which she won’t be left with any ‘shoba’ forever.’ Google Translate says shoba in English can be beauty, lustre, glory, smartness and scintillation. Replace them in the tweet and you have: ‘…after which she won’t be left with any beauty/lustre/glory/smartness/scintillation forever’. It is a threat, but how do you extrapolate sexism?

Thackeray’s response was benign by his standards. It can be construed as many things but misogyny is bizarre. The only way for anyone to arrive at that is to think that Thackeray was referring to De being divorced once. There is, however, a simpler explanation. Penguin India has a line of books that goes under De’s imprint. She selects and promotes those titles. The second of them released some months ago with the monologue Sdé on its cover and the name of that book was Breaking Up: Your Guide to Getting Divorced.

Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Raut saying that what De said was empty talk done by people after getting drunk in page 3 parties and his willingness to bring her down to sobriety is the language of threat. But there are hundreds of instances in the Sena’s history of worse language where a man was the object.

In the portrayal of clumsy Sena rhetoric (Rane, Thackeray, Raut have the same DNA) as sexism, De has had her own contribution as well. This Sunday, she wrote in a column in The Times of India: ‘Can they do no better than launch cheap, personal attacks on a woman?’ For a moment let’s be gender neutral and agree that cheap personal attacks should be made on no one. Let us then turn to De’s Twitter account a few days before this attack was made. This is her tweet after Raj Babbar said that Rs 12 can buy you a lunch in Mumbai: ‘Never understood what the beautiful, intense, sensitive Smita Patil saw in the Blabbering Babber. Maybe he fed her 12 rupee meals?’ Don’t fault Babbar for thinking this is a cheap personal attack.

Even if there are no Rs 12 meals on offer in Mumbai, bringing in a long dead wife sort of qualifies for it. Would we call it Maximum City, Maximum Misandry?

Or should this rule be amended: it is okay to make cheap personal attacks against some people, like politicians who have put their foot into their mouth. Or whose looks you find amusing. Which is probably why De tweeted this about Rahul Gandhi once: ‘Correct me if I am wrong, but in my time a beehive hairstyle was in vogue. Sonia often sports a beehive. Rahul must have been inspired by mom!’ It’s not such a nasty tweet, but yo, what does feminism say about evaluating human beings as objects based on body… and hairstyle?

After Asaram Bapu’s ashram was found using large amounts of water for a Holi celebration, De tweeted: ‘Ass-a-ram has done it again!…’ Ass-a-ram might be a good laugh for many, but not for Asaram. If there is a school that teaches such creative puns using names of other people, then it is from that very place that Nitesh Rane learnt his Shobic turn of phrase.

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