You are a pervert who harasses a woman when the relationship goes through a rough phase. You have private pictures of the woman and you threaten her that those pictures will be sent to her conservative parents if the woman doesn’t come back to you. You even threaten the woman with physical violence.

The woman doesn’t come back, because she has now realised that you are a prick. But your male ego can’t take this refusal and insubordination. So you send her pics to the woman’s parents, and now her mother is traumatised. You even try to hurt her professionally, as both of you also worked together.

You are indeed a prick. In fact, you are a criminal, guilty of sexual and mental harassment of at least two women, apart from breach of privacy, voyeurism, and abuse of power. You are a villain.

But what if you are a left-liberal activist fighting for equality and justice, and world peace?

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Obviously, it doesn’t matter what you actually do till you claim to fight for such grand causes. Things will be alright. I had read about this phenomenon in this OpIndia.com article earlier, but I witnessed that first hand on Facebook today.

So this guy called Kumar Sundaram was accused of doing what I described above after a woman couldn’t take it anymore and came up with a public post on Facebook.

The guy, a leftist claiming to be an anti-nuclear weapon activist (yes, unlike the right-wingers who want to do everything themselves, the left-wingers choose a focus area) writes on various left-leaning blogs and websites such as Scroll and edits a website called IndiaResists.

First, he refuted all charges, and claimed he was in depression.

With the influx of mental health related articles and news these days, you are bound to get an empathetic shoulder to cry. After all, if you are depressed, your crimes like harassment and blackmail are null and void. Because a depressed person can be absolved of such crimes.

umm… but this may not go down well. That’s not how it works.

More people will stand up for the one you harassed, hence the public sentiments are more likely to go against you.

So what do you do now?

You go for the second-best escape route. You write an unconditional apology as your Facebook status.

Because, that’s how it works. And it does work. You will be hailed as a hero who was brave enough to accept he made a ‘mistake’.

Left-liberals, who are the champions of equality and justice and feminism, will hail you are a hero for not only committing the crime but also accepting it. (after all, not everyone can trend how #निर्दोष you are on Twitter every alternate day!)

You will become “brave”:

There may be some “trolls” asking you to be jailed, but their views doesn’t matter. You will be saluted for your bravery and “integrity”:

At some point, someone will also tell you and the one who accused you of harassment and blackmail, not to wash ‘dirty linen in public’ (because till the time the woman didn’t go public, things were just all right, no?) because ‘ghar ki baat ghar mein rahe to hi achchha hai‘.

Entire left is a ghar, you see, unlike the right, which is more like footpath – koi bhi aa jaaye, so jaaye, aur kabhi Kerala se koi communist aa ke gaadi chadha de.

But let’s not talk about crimes here. Let’s be progressive. Let’s forget and forgive.