At the BRICS Summit in New Delhi, women stood at the centre of India’s diplomatic vocabulary: architects of the Global South, innovators, decision-makers, and engines of economic progress. The language travelled through summit halls with the sheen of a promise. Yet, beyond the cameras and communiqués, a harsher domestic script was being written.Sexualised AI-generated images targeting Congress leader Sonia Gandhi circulated through the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state-unit social-media handles. At roughly the same moment, The Hindu and Dainik Bhaskar carried full-page advertisements presenting Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the Dera Sacha Sauda chief serving a 20-year sentence for raping two women followers, in a favourable light. One woman was digitally dragged into a manufactured barroom. A convicted rapist was offered, however briefly, the respectable daylight of public print.This is not a stray contradiction. It is a political aesthetic. A woman is dressed in ceremonial language—Devi, goddess, Nari Shakti—while women with inconvenient agency are made to bear shame, suspicion, ridicule, and sexual threat. On the diplomatic dais, she is an emblem of the future. In the political arena, she is too often made into a target.Must Rahul Gandhi be a 'Perfect' Feminist Before We Listen to Him?Anvita Dutt’s Bulbbul supplies the darker image. The trapped bulbul is adored, adorned, and enclosed; silk and gold make the cage appear like devotion. Her toe-rings are offered as sanctity, though they bend and wound the feet that must wear them. The household calls this protection. It is control rendered beautiful enough to escape accusation.So it is with the republic’s public language. India builds an ornate global stage on which a woman is honoured as the maker of tomorrow. The words are polished for presidents, investors, multilateral institutions and the watching world. Regardless, the same political climate permits a real woman’s dignity to be digitally mutilated for partisan pleasure, and permits the reputation of a convicted rapist to be washed in the language of public respectability.The cage is not always made of iron, often it is made of praise, ritual, pixels, and applause.A Bar, an Algorithm, a WarningNo party comes to this argument with clean hands. In 2024, the Congress used AI to cast Narendra Modi as a chor (thief). In the same period that AI images of Sonia Gandhi emerged during the BRICS Summit, its Congress regional unit retaliated with synthetic satire, invoking Amit Shah through the sinister Maruti Omni meme. Both deserve criticism.But equivalence has limits. Fabricating a male politician as a thief or fixer is crude political caricature. Constructing Sonia Gandhi dancing in a bar, wrapped in insinuations about her Italian origins and sexual respectability, reflects an older weapon—shame.This is a tried-and-tested strategy. In the past, fake images have repeatedly been circulated to sexualise Sonia Gandhi and cast aspersions on her character. One image purportedly showing Gandhi dancing in a bar was actually of Go-Go dancers performing at the Rawson Hotel in Sydney’s Auburn in November 1967. Another set of photographs, shared as showing Gandhi in beachwear, was actually of Swiss actor Ursula Andress on the sets of the first James Bond film, Dr No.BJP state-unit accounts circulated Sonia Gandhi's AI images, shifting the attack from a woman’s politics to her body. Both sides may weaponise AI, but not every weapon carries the same history. Sexual humiliation has long been used to discipline women in public life.AI has simply given an old prejudice new wings. The slur now has an algorithm; humiliation travels at the speed of a share. When women are celebrated as Shakti, but their dignity becomes political entertainment, power is still answering a woman’s argument by putting her body on trial.The Advertisement and the StainDuring the summit’s international glare, The Hindu carried a full-page advertisement portraying Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh favourably. Singh, a self-styled sect leader, is serving a 20-year sentence for raping two women followers. The paper later apologised, but the image had already entered the public bloodstream.A full-page advertisement arrives with the authority of ink and institutional familiarity. It places a convicted rapist back within the frame of public respectability, while the violence attached to his name is pushed to the margins, conviction turned into copy, and suffering into a footnote.The trapped bulbul knows this trick. The cage need not be locked with chains when it is decorated with garlands, smiling portraits and calls to forget. Women are asked to carry the memory of violence, so that powerful men may enjoy the comfort of amnesia.Women-led development cannot live only in conference speeches. It must insist, on the ground, that women’s dignity is not negotiable and that no man’s public usefulness outweighs the harm he has done.Assaulted, Not Silenced: Muslim Women Journalists Who Refused to Be IntimidatedThe Goddess and the CitizenIndia’s political vocabulary is crowded with women made sacred, so they need not be free. There is the mother, praised for sacrifice; the sister, guarded as family honour; the goddess, safe because she is divine and cannot dissent. Bharat Mata asks nothing of ministers, files no complaint, chooses no lover, and demands no equal wage. The living woman is harder to contain.She has anger, desire, and a vote that belongs to no father, husband, caste council or political party. She may reject a marriage, marry across caste or faith, report sexual violence, seek work, challenge a delayed examination or ask why power may ridicule her but cannot be questioned. Such freedom unsettles the keepers of honour.Here, Shakti is an alibi. Woman is praised as power when her power is devotional, abstract or useful to another’s story. When she speaks in her own name, however, the trapped bulbul is reminded of the price of song. Her character is interrogated, her image altered, and her body made a battlefield for male political ambition.India’s freedom struggle carried this unresolved tension. It fought colonial rule while caste hierarchy, patriarchal command and communal anxieties endured within the national home. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925, emerged amid this muscular nationalism, frequently invoking women through protection, purity and sacrifice. Still, protection, praise, and control can become three polished names for confinement.Europe’s fascist regimes made the formula unmistakable. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy treated feminism, bodily autonomy, and women’s independence as dangers to the nation. Their ideal woman was obedient, domestic and reproductive, not an equal citizen.India is not Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Yet, when nationalism imagines the nation as a threatened household, women become its guarded gates.“Love jihad” reveals that grammar recasting adult Hindu women as communal property and their choices as demographic danger. The goddess receives flowers. The citizen requires rights.The Never-Ending Search for the Next 'Jihad'Poets Against the CageJoseph Brodsky, the Russian-born American Nobel laureate, warned that a society deaf to poetry descends into the language of “the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.” Poetry restores moral hearing. It reveals the cage when power calls it sanskriti, protection or national pride.Women’s empowerment cannot be achieved by women alone. Patriarchy is maintained through institutions, households, and markets largely shaped by male authority. Men must therefore become active partners in dismantling it: refusing sexist slurs, fabricated images, moral policing and the false reverence that turns living women into silent idols.The 1930s offer a powerful Indian illustration. As fascism rose in Europe, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy exalted the obedient, fertile and silent woman, casting feminism and bodily autonomy as threats to national strength. India’s historical setting was distinct: its writers were working amid the anti-colonial struggle against British rule. Conversely, eminent male poets also challenged caste hierarchy, patriarchy and religious conservatism within the imagined national home.The Tamil poet Bharathidasan attacked Brahminical patriarchy and the authority claimed for the Manusmriti. Hindi poet Maithili Sharan Gupt moved epic women from the margins into moral debate. In Yashodhara, Buddha’s wife says:“Siddhi-hetu swami gaye, yeh gaurav ki baat;Par chori-chori gaye, yahi bada vyaghaat.”“His departure in pursuit of enlightenment may be glorious; but that he left secretly is the deeper wound.”In Saket, Gupt restores Urmila’s grief: “Patang bhi jalta hai, deepak bhi jalta hai”—“The moth burns, but the lamp burns too.” Her pain matches the heroism celebrated around her.Hindi poet and playwright Jaishankar Prasad exposed the velvet trap of “Naari, tum keval shraddha ho”—“Woman, you are reverence alone”—when reverence immobilises rather than liberates. Urdu poet Majaz Lakhnawi gives the answer: “Tu is aanchal se ik parcham bana leti to achha tha”—“The veil is beautiful, but it would be better made into a flag.”As poets, these men used their cultural authority to challenge the cage. That remains the task: men must help open the door, then step aside so women can walk through it.Break the GlassThe policing of women’s bodies is a living political method. In 2023, attempts to “contemporise” Mohenjo-daro’s bronze Dancing Girl by digitally covering or sanitising her image exposed an old anxiety in modern dress. For nearly five millennia, she has stood hand on hip—neither goddess nor mother, neither victim nor moral lesson. She occupies her own body. That unashamed presence still unsettles authority.The record of political speech is equally revealing. Narendra Modi described Sonia Gandhi in 2004 as an “imported Jersey cow,” called the wife of an Opposition politician a “Rs 50-crore girlfriend” in 2012, and converted Mamata Banerjee’s respectful Bengali title, “Didi,” into a rally taunt in 2021. These were not policy arguments. They turned women in public life into animal imagery, sexual insinuation, and spectacle for male laughter.The record of violence is darker still: the rape and murder of eight-year-old Asifa Bano in Kathua; the 2022 remission of the 11 men convicted in the Bilkis Bano gang-rape and family-murder case, later quashed by the Supreme Court; and the stripping and public parade of two Kuki-Zo women in Manipur in 2023. Each has its own perpetrators, history and legal record. Together, they show how women’s bodies become territory on which mobs, communities and powerful men stage dominance.No summit declaration can erase this ledger, and no invocation of Nari Shakti can compensate for a public culture that venerates women as symbols while failing them as citizens.Rahul Gandhi’s words to young women in Pune—“You belong to nobody except yourself”—name the democratic principle at stake. To smash patriarchy is not to destroy faith, family or tradition. It is to destroy the permission slip through which men decide who may speak, love, marry, work, protest and lead.The remedy must begin: sexualised lies must carry consequences, women’s dignity must not be traded for influence, and every institution entrusted with justice must hear violence without prejudice. Education, too, must teach equality and the courage to recognise cruelty before it becomes custom.The splendour of summit halls will not prove women-led development, but the freedom of ordinary days—at home, on the street, in a classroom, at work and in public life. The bulbul does not need a finer cage or a more flattering song. It needs the sky. When women can speak, choose, dissent and lead without fear, the cage falls quiet, and the bulbul flies free. Still, India will honour Shakti only when every woman can step beyond it, unafraid, and find the road open before her.(Navina Jafa is a cultural activist, classical Kathak dancer, and independent cultural historian who writes on the intersections of culture, politics, and social issues. She is also an expert in heritage tourism and cultural-skills mapping. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)