With wrenching details about how the cancer had relapsed for the tenth time, and melodramatically blaming her own stars, Sushma tried to turn the saga that embroils her into a three-hanky sob story bound to melt the stoniest heart. And then finally she threw herself at the mercy of Parliament in full-fledged self-sacrificing Nirupa Roy glory.

Sushma Swaraj finally decided to go at it womano a womano as she fights back in the Lalitgate affair.

Main poochna chahti hoon ki agar meri jagaah Sonia ji hoti toh kya karti? Marne ke liye chhod deti? (I want to know if Sonia-ji had been in my place what would she have done? Would she have let her die?)

Even if Sonia Gandhi had done the same would it make it kosher?

By gratuitously dragging Sonia Gandhi’s name into a story about a cancer patient, Sushma is trying to turn what is really a scandal about doing a favour to Lalit Modi into an all-women soap opera – the female minister appealing to the female leader of the Opposition on behalf of a female cancer patient.

With wrenching details about how the cancer had relapsed for the tenth time, and melodramatically blaming her own stars, Sushma tried to turn the saga that embroils her into a three-hanky sob story bound to melt the stoniest heart. And then finally she threw herself at the mercy of Parliament in full-fledged self-sacrificing Nirupa Roy glory.

Agar is tarah ki mahila ki madat karna gunah hai toh haan maine gunah kia hai, agar ek mahila ki madad karna apraadh hai, to han maine ye apraadh kia hai. (If helping a woman like this is crime then I have done a crime).

But the apradh, if any, is really about something else that Sushma bypassed in her twelve minute plus soliloquy.

Nobody is accusing her of “requesting” the British government to issue travel documents for Lalit Modi. The question is why did she deal with the Lalit Modi appeal clandestinely without informing the government and her own foreign secretary. Or India’s own high commission in the UK. Given his legal problems and her own family’s long professional history with the man why did she not recuse herself from the entire affair? She’s caught in an unenviable position. If she thought there was nothing untoward in Lalit Modi’s humanitarian request, why the secrecy and protocol deviation around it? And if she thought there was something untoward then why did she do it without bringing the other players in government into it?

Realising that’s a Catch-22, Sushma Swaraj was putting on her best Our Lady of Infinite Compassion act using an emotional cloudburst to drown out the actual procedural questions being put to her.

When Mulayam Singh Yadav had told journalists to stop hounding Sushma saying “You know what my party thinks about women. It is sau khoon maaf (100 murders forgiven)” I had written that kind of “patronising uncle-ji sexism imprisons women in the ‘weaker sex’ box far more effectively than any overt misogyny.” And veteran politician Sushma didn’t need Mulayam to turn her into a damsel in distress. Alas, Sushma decided to live up to that stereotype herself by playing the gender card.

Sushma, a veteran politician in India since the 1970s, a Leader of the Opposition in the 15th Lok Sabha, now a cabinet minister, seems to have decided that what she needs to do is pull at the nation’s heartstrings and come across as a woman helping another woman in distress. And how could Sonia-ji not see the virtue of that?

It is true that Lalit Modi’s wife is not the only Indian in distress the minister has helped. When Sabah Shawesh, a Yemeni national married to an Indian, and mother of an eight-month-old baby tweeted for help during the evacuation of Sanaa in Yemen, Sushma sprang to her help. Sushma also tweeted that in a humanitarian gesture India evacuated three Pakistani nationals from Al Hodeida. When she was tagged in a tweet about a photographer from Kerala battling for life in an Oman hospital without any help from the Indian Embassy she immediately asked the embassy in Oman to visit him in the hospital.



All of these incidents are laudable but they also followed protocol where the Indian embassy was pressed into service unlike the Lalit Modi case where she bypassed protocol to deal with it herself.

Sushma Swaraj might be a very compassionate person. The point at issue here is not whether Sushma would not have been so moved to action by the plight of another cancer patient. The point is whether she did this the WAY she did it because this was in fact not just another cancer patient, but Mrs Lalit Modi, a woman whose husband had 16 Enforcement Directorate notices pending against him?

Even the most naïve Indian can figure out what probably happened here. Lalit Modi needed help. He reached out to old friend Sushma Swaraj for help. He didn’t ask her for a recommendation for travel papers and she did not give any so that’s a non sequitur. What he needed and what she gave was her version of a No Objection Certificate on behalf of the government of India. There does not have to be a quid pro quo. She does not have to gain financially from it. Powerful people do these favours for other powerful people all the time because that’s what powerful friends are for. We all get that.

As apradhs go this is not on the scale of the many favours scandals that have beset Indian politics. And the Congress is definitely a party living in glasshouses and throwing stones in this regard. But when Sushma decides that her best defence in this affair is to present herself as the wronged woman whose sin is that she cared too much for another woman in need, she does herself, and women, grave disservice.