<b>Mihir S Sharma:</b> The country for old men

Last December, when many of us were out on the streets around India Gate and at Jantar Mantar, you could have gotten the distinct impression that, in India, sexual crimes and predation were something that other people did. Poor people, from villages - not people like us, who have power and privilege and access to the best moral instruction.

This past fortnight has not been a good one for that assumption.

First came news that the Gujarat government had, apparently on behalf of a prime ministerial candidate, stalked a young woman architect. The crime was bad enough, but the justification - so full of holes it was impossible to believe - was even more painful. The girl's father had requested her security, we were told, and so she was snooped on. The unquestioning response to this justification reveals how far we are from having a culture that is respectful of individual rights: as our leading conservative intellectual, Madhu Kishwar, said: "for most of us parent-child relations in India are sacred ... we give them life-long rights over us." Rights that, clearly, can also be ceded to other old men when your adult child travels across a state border.
 

Then there came accusations that a retired Supreme Court judge - a member of the one institution that has seemed, in our public culture, to preserve itself from decay - had harassed a law student who was interning for him. Worryingly, this immediately became an issue only for the institution itself to handle - and the guardians of our probity seemed to want to protect the anonymity of the retired judge as much as that of the student he allegedly harassed.

And, finally, we were told that the founder-editor of Tehelka magazine, Tarun Tejpal, had twice assaulted a journalist he employed during the magazine's annual Goa conclave. Here, again, we saw a familiar pattern in our culture: an entitled older man who seems to believe that his position of power gives him a right over women's bodies that, of course, only they have. And here, too, a desire to protect the "institution" was, tragically, the first response of those who should have known better. In the letters from Mr Tejpal and Tehelka's managing editor, Shoma Chaudhury, which were seemingly leaked, it feels as though Mr Tejpal chose his own "punishment" - a six-month "recusal", which some are calling the Apology Holiday. Worse, the protection of the apparent offender's reputation is confused with the magazine's own reputation, not just by Tehelka's critics but by its own leaders.

Reacting to a crime against a woman with a desire to preserve an institution's honour is no better than reacting to a crime against a woman with a desire to preserve a caste's, clan's or village's honour. In both cases, you compound the first crime, of believing the woman has no rights, with the second offence, of believing that the "honour" of some collective in which the older man has great power is of greater concern than the woman's desire for justice. A very important part of our culture, that.

Honour drives not just khap panchayats in India; and sexual crimes are not something that only migrant workers commit. It is sad that this needed pointing out.

In the end, institutional honour is as terrible a thing as any other sort of honour. Unless the institutions themselves are democratic and egalitarian - and how can commercial organisations, for example, be such? - they will merely replicate the oppressive hierarchies of power they see in the wider culture outside.

So we should be instantly suspicious of not just institutions that claim "honour", but professions - like journalism or the law - that claim that they are in fact a sacred calling of some sort. Such pompous claims of being somehow above the fray usually conceal and support the sort of behaviour that, in less self-righteous and crusading professions, would have been called out long ago.

Both journalism and the law are merely professions like any other. But, in both, the founding myths of righteousness and virtue - such a masculine word, virtue - frequently empower the stars of the trade to behave with their female employees in ways that would get them thrown out of many professionally run private sector multinationals.

This week has been a bad week in many ways. But there is much about the news that should cause hope. The clear-thinking courage of the young women who were the targets of men they admired, for example. The holes they have begun to poke in the self-righteous sanctimony of the old men with power over these organisations of which we're so proud. That, at least, is good news for Indian public culture, even if nothing else is.

But it remains depressing that one of these three cases has not been responded to like the others. The first one I mentioned. Because, apparently, being a "strong leader" and a mystifyingly self-righteous prime ministerial candidate means, in our culture, that you are above the law and morality. We should be very worried.