Pappu Yadav, an independent MP from Bihar, made comments at a press conference last week about how he believes that “90% of female politicians cannot start their careers without entering a male leader’s bedroom”. While he had in the same breath spoken about the exploitation of women by politicians both in India and abroad, as well as how women are not respected even where goddesses are worshipped, this invented statistic has drawn serious ire from across the country. The Bihar State Women Commission has taken suo motu cognisance and demanded that Yadav lose Lok Sabha membership.
Politics is a domain that is known for being problematic, to say the least. Even Yadav’s own criminal record speaks to this. Still, perhaps there is a small kernel of truth in the contention that it is difficult for women to enter that bastion and rise in its ranks without undergoing sexual harassment or violence, or even just sexism.
Unlike the entertainment industry, where the infamous casting couch is a recognised phenomenon and substantiated by data — in the form of personal narratives from people who have experienced or witnessed it, and spoken in public forums about it — the contention Yadav made here is not widely known. Yet it is not difficult to imagine: Indian misogyny is in every field, in every location. Careful phrasing, accurate representation and greater sensitivity would have made for a better case, if Yadav had insisted on speaking on behalf of women at all.
It is understandable why women in politics in India, including BJP MLA Maithili Thakur and JD-U MLA Shalini Mishra, are outraged by the percentage comment, for it can be inferred as casting aspersions about how they got to where they are career-wise. Responding to Yadav’s comments, the JDU’s Rina Choudhary told the press: “We ask Pappu Yadav: your own family has been in politics — your mother, your wife — as MP in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. Would they accept such comments? Then why demean other women with such disrespect?”
There is one question which seems to be lost in this debate, however: why would anyone equate a person who has been taken advantage of with a person who willingly acts without integrity in order to get ahead? Some of the outrage does not seem to make a distinction. Somehow, Yadav’s statement about “entering the bedroom” seems to have been read as purely consensual activity, even though it was within the context of the predatory behaviour of male politicians.
Yadav’s comments and the backlash to them had occurred when the 131st Constitutional (Amendment) Bill, 2026, a Bill relating to delimitation that was represented by the Centre as being about women’s political reservation, had just failed to pass. Women’s political participation in India is a hot button topic at present.
But if we think about how India at large, if misogynistic and sexual exploitation is rife, then we can be sure such crimes exist in politics too. Perhaps if the contention had come from a different quarter — a woman perhaps, or a non-opposition politician, or merely someone who communicated the thought articulately — it may be something that more people would be considering seriously.