By Sandip Roy

Who knew that Sushma Swaraj had so many knights in shining armour, that too from the ranks of the Opposition? When the Union foreign minister returned from a seven-day tour of Europe earlier this week, she ran headlong into the Lucknow passport controversy.

Allegedly, a passport officer had misbehaved with a Hindu-Muslim couple. The upset couple tweeted at Swaraj in protest. A day later, the ministry handed over the passports. The officer was transferred. The officer had his side of the story claiming he was misrepresented. The couple had theirs. Whether Swaraj herself was personally involved is unclear.

But the storm troopers of Twitterverse unleashed their vitriol on the external affairs minister, whom they derisively nicknamed ‘Visa Mata’. She was abused. Her own kidney transplant was mocked as an ‘Islamic kidney’. Swaraj hit back, exposing some of the abusive handles by sharing some of the tweets she said she was “honoured with”. Her senior colleagues, even the ones normally vociferous on Twitter, suddenly found other very important things to tweet about. Their silence was deafening.

The Congress piped up, not entirely without glee, when it decided to “applaud” her decision to call out the “heinous trolls of [her] own party”. But this quickly also became a story of how the Union Cabinet was not standing up to defend the ‘honour of a woman minister’. Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “take action against such cyber criminals if he really believes in protecting the dignity of women”. His colleague, Randeep Singh Surjewala, pointed out that Modi follows some handles prone to trolling.

“And now through trolls, a lady minister and one of the most senior BJP leader is being harassed,” said Surjewala. Tweet as Screech It’s a fact that Twitter can be a toxic waste dump where trolls roam in swarms spoiling for a fight. And it’s also a fact that outspoken women online bear the brunt of it, rape threats and all. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said just a few days ago that despite its immense benefits, digital connectivity had opened the door to new forms of oppression and violence, and often women found that virtual intimidation could spill over into the real world.

Globally, women are 27 times more likely to be harassed online, according to Seyi Akiwowo, founder and director of Glitch!UK, a non-profit that fights online abuse and harassment in Britain. Swaraj just got a taste of what it is like to be a woman who dares to have an opinion on Twitter. But this is not some litmus test of members of the Cabinet’s chivalry quotient. They should have been defending any colleague facing the Twitter mob, not just a ‘lady minister’. Swaraj is a veteran politician. In the name of gallantry, let’s not reduce her to a damsel in distress. That does her adisservice. Sushma Swaraj has been elected seven times as an MP, three times as an MLA. She was Cabinet minister in Haryana in 1977 at the age of 25, the youngest ever Cabinet minister in the country at that time. She’s won the Outstanding Parliamentarian award.

She’s been the party spokesperson and the Leader of the Opposition. She has more political experience than the prime minister himself. All this sympathy, some of it no doubt disingenuous, for the plight of a ‘lady minister’ only serves to buy yet again into the idea of the ‘weaker sex’ who has to be defended by the chivalrous boys. Swaraj has been in the game long enough to know that in politics, it does not pay to be sugar and spice and all things nice. She can act tough. She can even threaten to shave her head to make a point. That her colleagues failed to rally around her publicly is not about their lack of chivalry. It’s about their keen nose for politics. Swaraj has been, and remains, a potential BJP prime ministerial candidate by sheer dint of her experience.

There is possibly the perception that there is danger in seeming too close to her even in the virtual world. It’s surely been noticed by those who keep track of who follows whom that on Twitter she rarely chooses to be her master’s voice. Break Glass Sealing It’s not easy being a woman in politics. The excitement about Nirmala Sitharaman’s appointment as defence minister seemed to more about her gender than her résumé. Titillating photographs of Smriti Irani in a swimsuit popped up as soon as she became a minister.

Women can never escape the gender trap it seems, no matter how many glass ceilings they break. But Swaraj, who has broken many glass ceilings in her time, does not need the old (and middle-aged) boys’ club to come to her rescue in the virtual world. She would probably much rather they got out of her way in the real world.