Crying wolf on gender

As the compel-ling and crazy Sheena Bora murder case unfolds before us, detail by bizarre detail, the main focus remains on the prime murder accused Indra-ni Mukerjea. Let’s try and look at the case without being judgemental and without recourse to that witty but tad sexist French phrase cherchez la femme (look for the woman). A woman is accused by her driver of conspiring with him and a former husband of hers (not Sheena’s father) to murder young Sheena. She is arrested by the police.

It turns out that Sheena, whom she introduced to everyone as her sister, was actually her daughter. Her current husband says he knew nothing. The current husband had a son from a former marriage and the young man and Sheena were in a relationship of which the sister/mother disapproved. Pay attention. It’s not going to get any easier. The woman’s brother now says, he is, in fact, her son, and the woman abandoned him and his sister to live with their grandparents.

This murder happened three years ago. The sister/ mother told everyone that Sheena had moved to the US. She continued to send messages from Sheena’s phone. Letters were sent to Sheena’s landlord and her employer after her death apparently organised by the mother/sister. Every day there are revelations of a new twist, a new secret and a new level of disbelief. Let us also not forget that Ms  Mukerjea was a powerful media person married to an even more powerful media person, Peter Mukerjea, once head of the Star network in India.

Together they started the much-publicised TV company, 9X, which included the news channel NewsX, and together they also exited 9X with even more publicity and drama. The alleged involvement of one of Ms Mukerjea’s former husbands in the murder puts her former marriages under the spotlight, not to mention the allegations of the man who claims to be her son.

There will be discussions over a mother who would not acknowledge her children. Or who abandoned them. There will be questions about the necessity of presenting a daughter as a sister. Are these discussions sexist or do they stem from the details of the case as we know them and curiosity about the human condition?
Expectedly, though, there are rumblings of misogyny in the way Ms Mukerjea is being discussed.

People are perhaps jealous because she was a powerful, ambitious woman, it’s being said. Or because she had many relationships, husbands and children, some hidden and some declared. Indeed, there must be many such small-minded people looking for salacious pleasure in everything. But is it possible to discuss the murder of Sheena Bora, a young woman whose mother apparently denied her existence, who her brother says was practically abandoned until they were both in their teens, by ignoring Ms Mukerjea completely? If she was a man, who had done the same thing, would people not be as intrigued, shocked, vicariously interested?

“Media tycoon hatches conspiracy with driver and second wife to kill daughter from first wife/girlfriend, who he had introduced to the world as his sister, apparently because she was in love with the son of his current wife from a former marriage...”, would the story be ignored? I wonder. Unfortunately, huma-ns can be quite horrible. And this case seems to have all of it. And men and women are both equally capable of ghastly behaviour in their own ways.

The victim in this case is the murdered young woman. But there is something very distasteful in the idea that women, and mothers especially, are somehow better human beings and by dint of motherhood incapable of wrongdoing, illegality and criminality. This, in fact, is a sexist argument that puts women on some idiotic pedestal and also belittles men. There is no correlation between being an ambitious person or even, as some have suggested, a social climber and being a murderer, and to even suggest as much is patently unfair.

But that is a gender neutral observation. To some, however, to even accuse a woman of being a social climber is misogynistic because it puts implications on the way she uses her femininity to get where she wants to be. Yet men are also accused of being upstarts, arrivistes, social climbers. The justification could be that men are forgiven in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink way for their transgressions but one could argue that that is not always true. It is just that male actions, weaknesses or ambitions are most often judged from a human prism, not necessarily from their dominant sexual hormones.

If you want to take the absolute moral high ground, then no murder case must ever be discussed at all until the last verdict in the last appeal has been pronounced. That is one mountain that is too high for most of our petty minds to climb. To focus solely on Sheena Bora’s past relationships which have no bearing on this case could be considered misogynistic. But to wonder why her mother has been accused of killing her cannot be. And yet the argument, which has been made, that to speculate on Ms Mukerjea as a murderer is in itself misogynistic borders on the foolish. As a lifelong feminist and a firm believer that the human race cannot continue to oppress 50 per cent of its population, such arguments are in fact damaging to the cause.

The law cannot change because women are accused of crimes and nor can women expect either special treatment or any leeway in such situations. The accused in this case has defenders based on her gender but sadly no real friends of any sex who have come out and spoken for her. All those who feel Ms Mukerjea is guilty because she is a female who led a certain kind of life that does not fit with their morality are definitely being misogynistic. But, if you bring up the gender argument in every case then you get into a “cry wolf” situation, potentially harmful to everyone. Please find some other way to “save women” or stay in the news.

The writer is a senior journalist who writes on media affairs, politics and social trends