Poornima Joshi: The Idea of Illicit Love: Power, Politics & Patriarchy

Poornima Joshi in Kindle magazine

The childlike scrawl, diligently correcting spelling errors, tentatively titled ‘suicide note’ is even more poignant in expression than Geetika Sharma’s delicate profile in the one picture that accompanies the various stories about why this beautiful young woman decided to become her own executioner. Her distress, the final horror before she ended her life is stamped in every line of the crumpled note, an exhibit before the court like everything else in her life. “I am shattered inside,” she wrote, marking her tormentors in capital letters ‘GOPAL GOYAL KANDA’ and ‘ARUNA CHADHA’, the absconding Sirsa MLA and his business associate respectively. “I have forgiven them a number of times,” she said, admitting it was her “biggest mistake”.

Why did she? A man who stalked her when she was still a student, whose obsession is evident in the staggering 400 SMSs that the police say he sent her at an alarming frequency. The Managing Director of MDLR group, who stipulated that she had to report to him “on each and every day after work”. This is the precise clause in the agreement drawn up when Geetika joined the company in January, 2011! She agreed to these terms? Her parents had their pictures clicked with him? She let his company sponsor her studies?

Kanda’s responses are more predictable. In the application for bail in anticipation of arrest that this legislator in the Haryana assembly has filed before the Delhi High Court, he describes Geetika as “hypersensitive” and “unable to strike a balance between her personal life and work”. This should sound familiar. It is typically the sort of puerile refrain men propagate with boring frequency. Kanda could be among countless male bosses who find it more convenient to attach labels i.e. “hypersensitive”, “unable to separate personal and professional” than deal with their own confusions and complexes about women colleagues. But the backdrop of this seemingly commonplace male delinquency should have been enough to trigger that frisson of fear, the subliminal sign that separates routine boorishness from tangible peril.

Which brings us back to why Geetika should have chosen go back to join a company that made her sign an agreement to meet the Managing Director (Kanda) every evening. It could be argued that he left her very little choice. She quit the MDLR airlines and fled to Dubai, apparently to escape him. But he forced her back by forging a letter on behalf of a station house officer in Gurgaon to tell Emirates, her Dubai-based employers that she had defaulted on a loan in his company. She subsequently came back and became a director in his company in 2011.

Geetika was 22-year-old at the time, legally an adult who could make informed choices. It is difficult, however, to deduct whether choices of the kind Geetika made imply complete comprehension of her own place in the power equation between her and Gopal Goyal Kanda. There can be no gender judgement on such shortcuts young people routinely take, sometimes to compensate for the lack of talent but mostly in a haste to sit at the high table. Men do it by the almost effortless exhibition of camaraderie with male superiors, bonhomie at the nearest pub and easy banter that excludes women. Women have the option of manipulating sexual tension and holding out promises.

What separates such commonplace sexual jugglery from Geetika and scores of others like her – Anuradha Bali aka Fiza, Bhanwari Devi, Madhumita Shukla, Kavita Chaudhuri, Shashi Sen, Shivani Bhatnagar et al – is that these women only had an illusion of the power to manipulate. They cultivated liaisons with men with whom they never had the capacity to negotiate. They were out of depth in situations they only imagined they controlled. And each paid a horrific price for her illusions.

The discovery of the stunning Anuradha Bali’s maggot-ridden body in her Mohali house earlier this month is a macabre reminder of her travails, once as breezily romantic as her acquired name ‘Fiza’. The beautiful girl from a modest, middle-class Punjabi family raised quite a few eyebrows in the well-manicured streets of Chandigarh when she became the Assistant Advocate General of Haryana. For a while, it seemed she was the conqueror in the murky world of Haryana politics; elevating herself to high offices and marrying Chander Mohan, the Deputy Chief Minister of the state who exercised the simple expedient of converting to Islam for the purpose.

But her triumph was as short lived as Chander Mohan’s conversion to Chand Mohammed. He went back to his wife on his father, the redoubtable Bhajan Lal’s diktats and all was forgiven. Anuradha Bali remained Fiza, preserving her lover’s e-mails and SMSs in a CD, telling the police they should prosecute him for rape and cheating; a complaint he described as “nothing more than toilet paper”. Now she is dead. Her gruesome end has inspired as little sympathy as her desperate efforts to recapture the elusive limelight once the Fiza-Chand story had played out in the razzle-dazzle of 24/7 television reports. The police do not seem too keen on investigating whether she was murdered or committed suicide. And Chand Mohammed is back in business as Chander Mohan.

“Their positions are precarious. The balance of power is so heavily tilted against them that I sometimes wonder how they ever imagined they could survive these relationships,” says Amita Verma, author of Poetry, Passion, Power: The Story of Madhumita on the life of Madhumita Shukla, the poet who was murdered at the behest of her lover, former minister in the Uttar Pradesh cabinet Amarmani Tripathi and his wife and co-convict Madhumani.

There is a common thread among three such cases that Verma has keenly watched as journalist and author – Madhumita Shukla, Shashi murder case in Faizabad that involved legislator Anand Sen and Kavita Rani Chowdhary in Meerut, whose liaisons with three ministers in the previous Mulayam Singh Yadav cabinet are believed to be the cause of her murder. The link is their total miscalculation of the power dynamics involving their lovers and their own ambition. For powerful men, the combination is entertaining only till such time as this fleeting diversion does not threaten their own position.

Amarmani Tripathi was happy to indulge Madhumita Shukla’s minor writing talent in return for her complete devotion. He even took her home, introducing her to his wife Madhumani as his “friend’s mistress”. Madhumita moved to Lucknow from the nondescript Hathipur in Lakhimpur-Kheri and followed Tripathi in furtive tours outside Lucknow. He put her up in five star hotels, never allowing her entry in the state guest houses he stayed in as a minister. But the moment she sought legitimacy, for herself and his child that she was carrying, she was shot dead. All that remains is the countless letters she wrote, her tentative expressions of love and longing and a legal battle that her sister Nidhi fought to get her lover and his wife prosecuted for murder with the help of his political adversaries.

What is astounding in these cases, says Anita Roy, author and editor in the feminist publishing house Zubaan, is the assumption of absolute impunity by the men... 
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