If you want to understand the true cost of being a woman in Indian politics, do not look at the manifestos, the parliamentary seat counts, or the lip service paid to women’s empowerment. Look, instead, at the dark corners of political “IT” cells and the campaign rally microphones. Look at the sheer, unadulterated misogyny deployed to keep women in their place. A recent 2D image engineered by a right-wing troll account perfectly illustrates this. Targeting West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for a brand of politics that frequently centres the state’s Muslim population, the cartoon depicts her in a grossly sexualised posture, reducing a three-time elected head of state to a grotesque anatomical gate. It is a nauseating image, but we must not look away. We cannot either, because it was shared multiple times in the course of two days. It represents a deliberate, calculated strategy where if you cannot defeat a woman on policy, you weaponise her gender. You humiliate her, stripping her of her formidable political agency to present a crude caricature. But it would be intellectually dishonest to dismiss this as merely the work of fringe online trolls. This image is simply the visual manifestation of a rot that goes all the way to the top of India’s political hierarchy, across all party lines.The tragic reality is that the public humiliation of women is one of the few truly bipartisan agreements in Indian politics. The very leaders who claim to champion women’s rights frequently unleash or tolerate the vilest sexism when it suits their electoral math. The BJP’s attacks on Mamata Banerjee have repeatedly followed this pattern. During the 2021 West Bengal assembly campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s repeated “Didi, O Didi” taunt became controversial not because the word “Didi” is abusive in itself, but because of the performative sneer with which it was deployed against a sitting woman chief minister. In 2026, Union home minister Amit Shah’s “Didi, ae Didi” formulation again drew criticism from the TMC, which linked it to the 2021 pattern of taunting Banerjee rather than addressing her as a political equal. The policing of Banerjee’s body has been even more explicit. In 2021, after she campaigned with an injured leg, senior BJP leader Dilip Ghosh suggested she should wear Bermuda shorts if she wanted to show her leg. The remark was not a critique of governance. It was an attempt to discipline a woman politician through sartorial shame by judging what she wore, how she sat, what her injured body looked like, and whether she met the patriarchal standard of decency expected from a woman in public life. By 2024, the attacks became more intimate, with former judge and BJP candidate Abhijit Gangopadhyay’s “if her price is 10 lakh” remark against Banerjee leading the Election Commission to bar him from campaigning for 24 hours. Yet, the BJP never took any steps to control the repeated sexist remarks.The troll’s image of Banerjee is a direct product of this ecosystem. It takes the respectable-looking taunt and strips it of all pretence, revealing the pervert fantasy that a powerful woman can be politically defeated by sexually degrading her.But a serious feminist critique cannot stop at condemning the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Hindutva social media brigade. That would be politically convenient and morally incomplete, because misogyny in Indian politics is not confined to one party. It is a cross-party language of power. The TMC is led by a woman, but representation at the top does not absolve misogyny below. Senior TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee, for instance, has made repeated offensive remarks against opposition leaders as well as his party colleagues. During the 2024 Lok Sabha campaign trail, CPI(M)’s candidate Dipsita Dhar had alleged that Banerjee had mocked her skin colour, saying the CPI(M) did not campaign after sundown because she would be invisible in the dark. The point of such a remark is not to defeat an opponent’s politics, but to humiliate a young woman through colourism and sexism, making her body carry the burden of political defeat. That the TMC leadership completely failed to censure Kalyan Banerjee for so brazenly humiliating a young politician exposes the deep-rooted misogyny that thrives even within a woman-led party. The same pattern is visible in the political treatment of another Left candidate, Minakshi Mukherjee. In the 2026 assembly election, she is contesting against Kalyan Banerjee’s son Sirsanya from Uttarpara. Kalyan Banerjee has already attacked Mukherjee as a “migrant” candidate in the seat, and she has been mocked through remarks about body odour, clothing, and personal presentation. Similarly, TMC Minister Firhad Hakim’s reference to Sandeshkhali survivor and BJP candidate Rekha Patra as a “hero maal (beaten commodity)” exposes how class and caste intersect with sexism. Indian politics has already normalised a repertoire of bodily insults against women – whether they are branded as dark, loud, loose, old, smelly, glamorous, characterless, arrogant, too ambitious, too masculine, or not feminine enough. The vocabulary shifts from election to election, but the disciplinary function remains exactly the same.