On April 17, the Delimitation Bills, which were aimed to increase the number of seats in Lok Sabha and conduct delimitation for the stated purpose of “advancing women’s reservation”, were defeated in the Lok Sabha. A day later, on April 18, in an address to the nation, prime minister Narendra Modi referred to this defeat as “bhrun hatya” or foeticide. Around the same time Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath equated the defeat of the Bills to Draupadi’s “Cheerharan” or disrobing. Use of metaphors in political speech to evoke emotions is not new, but resorting to figurative imagery of violence against women to make political points requires a pushback.Calculated use of metaphorsFoeticide and rape are heinous offences which gravely violate the personhood, rights and dignity of the person against whom these offences are committed. By comparing these to the defeat of a Bill, which is nothing more than a political defeat, is to trivialise these offences and mock the victims and survivors.But these utterances were far from inadvertent or merely a momentary lapse in judgment. The language was deliberate and politically calculated – to cast the defeat not simply as legislative disagreement, but as an assault on women themselves. The timing was crucial as well. Just days before elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the prime minister used this rhetoric to politically isolate opposition parties – portraying them as forces intent on crushing women’s aspirations and dignity, while positioning himself as the sole defender and custodian of women’s rights.However, even as he was aggressively building a narrative of ‘anti-women’ opposition and “milking” the defeat of the Bills to its advantage, his party was also careful in ensuring that it didn’t alienate its core voter base – entitled men. See for instance, how Tejasvi Surya, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP referred to women’s reservation as ‘encroachment’ in his speech in Lok Sabha.Meanwhile, a post by the BJP’s official social media handle explained how linking women reservation to increase in Lok Sabha seats would lead to no sitting MP (read: sitting ‘male’ MP) losing their seat and women receiving ‘additional seats without infringing upon anyone else’s rights.’This is how patriarchy intersects with politics. Only bare minimum concessions are unwillingly made for women (even 33% reservation is inadequate given that women constitute roughly half the population of the country) in a way that ensures the least redistribution of power and unsettling of established order. But when the patriarch is denied the opportunity to be celebrated as the saviour of women, the frustration of that political defeat is expressed in a language that further victimises women. So, underlying the facade of the “Nari Shakti” slogan is the idea of a weak woman always in need of saving by a man. This also gets reflected in the tension at the intersection of gender and language.Political rhetoric of gendered violenceLanguage doesn’t just reflect thought. What gets expressed, how and when, reflects the power structures shaping it. Women experience linguistic discrimination when patterns consistently position women in subordinate roles – sexualised, servile, or secondary, while restricting their access to authority and credibility. What is considered “strong” or “acceptable” speech remains gendered – privileging masculine expression while diminishing or disciplining feminine forms.One is reminded of the incident in which the prime minister caricatured MP Renuka Chowdhary as a character from Ramayana because she laughed inhibitively at his speech or when he used the derogatory phrase “Didi o Didi” against former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee during previous election campaign. Recently, during election campaigning in Tamil Nadu, political commentator Ponraj called women cadre of the now chief minister Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) party as ‘sex workers’. In this way, language becomes a subtle but pervasive tool of gendered control, normalising inequality and shaping who is heard, believed, and legitimised in public discourse.The ease with which contemporary political speech reaches for metaphors like rape, foeticide, or disrobing is not accidental; it is rooted in a longer history of how violence against women in India has been made to carry meanings far beyond itself. Accounts of the Partition of India – especially in The Other Side of Silence and Borders and Boundaries –and incidents of communal violence including the Gujarat riots – show that sexual violence was framed not merely as individual harm, but as an assault on community honour and national identity. Women’s bodies became symbolic terrain – sites through which loss, shame, and violation were narrated. This marked a critical shift: violence began to circulate as political meaning, not just lived experience.It is this accumulated symbolic power that contemporary political speech draws upon. Terms like rape or foeticide are invoked not despite their gravity, but because of it – they compress complex events into the language of ultimate violation. This is particularly troubling when placed against the scale of actual violence. Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (2024) shows that roughly one rape was reported every 18 minutes. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) finds that among women aged 18-49, one in ten women report having faced physical violence since the age of 15. At the same time, preference for son and sex-selective practices persist, reflected in skewed sex ratios at birth across several states. These are not abstract harms but ongoing, structural realities – far removed from their casual deployment in political speech.What emerges, then, is a stark contradiction. Violence against women is hyper-visible in language – invoked to dramatise political stakes – yet insufficiently addressed in reality. The question is not merely about poor choice of words, but about a deeper political culture in which the gravity of violence is repeatedly borrowed, while its realities are left largely untouched.Resistance to gendered nature of political speechIt is fairly commonplace to use the phrase ‘murder of democracy’ by politicians and dissenters alike to refer to grave violation of laws, norms and procedures. Therefore, the objection is not to the use of every imagery of physical violence in political speech. Sometimes it may be the most effective way to express imminent danger, grave and irreparable violations of norms and convey a sense of urgency to mobilise action. But ‘rape’ and ‘foeticide’ are terms “impregnated” by the gendered nature of the violation they represent and reduce women’s bodies to a site of politics, in which women themselves are conspicuous by their absence. During the debate in Lok Sabha on the so-called women’s reservation bill, our analysis shows, only 55 women MPs spoke, of the total 133 who participated in the debate, with male MPs cornering 65% of the total time allocated to the debate.Thus, it is men speaking to other men, deploying violence against women merely as a political tool. A disturbingly accurate example of this is a recent video from West Bengal which shows a person dressed as Mamata Banerjee tied with a rope and paraded on streets in a post election result celebration by male political workers of the party which had made “Nari Shakti Vandan” as one of its electoral planks.It is imperative that we act urgently to challenge political speeches which invoke gendered violence as a rhetoric to prevent re-victimisation of victims as a metaphor!Maansi Verma is a lawyer and Founder, Maadhyam, a civic engagement initiative. Shivangi Shikhar is a social worker and researcher with more than 5 years of experience in child and women’s rights.