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When Trisha Was Insulted, MSM Roared. When PM Modi’s Dead Mother Was Abused, It Preached Freedom Of Expression

By
The Commune
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When Trisha Was Insulted, MSM Roared. When PM Modi's Dead Mother Was Abused, It Preached FoE

Compare the past seven days in Indian mainstream media, and a pattern falls out that no outlet has had the honesty to name: how loudly the press condemns cruelty toward a woman appears to depend far more on who’s inconvenienced by the outrage than on the cruelty itself.

When Udhayanidhi Stalin delivered a calculated, smirking double entendre about actor Trisha Krishnan at a Thanjavur rally, the coverage was immediate, wall-to-wall, and unsparing. NDTV, India Today, News18, Times of India – every major outlet deconstructed the moment frame by frame, catalogued the nine penal sections filed against him, and gave sustained airtime to condemnation from TVK, BJP, AIADMK, and even Congress’s Karti Chidambaram.

Anchors on camera called it “far too below the belt,” “despicable,” “terrible.” The framing was unambiguous: a powerful man had dragged an unwilling woman into a political fight to score points off a rival, and the press treated that as a serious institutional failure worth days of scrutiny.

That instinct, that dragging a woman into a political dispute to humiliate her is a genuine harm deserving real accountability, is the correct one. Nobody should quarrel with the press holding Udhayanidhi to that standard.

So, it’s worth asking why that same instinct evaporated so completely at Jantar Mantar, when a protester used abusive, sexualised language not about a rival’s family friend, but about a sitting Prime Minister’s late mother. There, the coverage pivoted almost instantly away from the abuse itself and into a story about “state overreach,” online vigilantism, and the dangers of doxxing. Outlets that spent replaying Udhayanidhi’s video clip declined to dwell on what was actually said in Delhi. The story became about protecting the person who said it, not about the person the abuse was directed at.

And where free-speech absolutism was nowhere to be found in the Udhayanidhi case – where the same commentariat that now invokes “FreeSpeech” and “ZeroFIR” hashtags stayed conspicuously silent, it suddenly became the framing of choice once the target was a Prime Minister’s dead mother. India Today ran an entire segment debating “the line between offensive speech and a criminal offence,” featuring a CJP spokesperson arguing that “standards of morality are subjective.” Preeti Choudhry called out the “hypocrisy” of applauding an arrest over speech in one case while excusing “the most vile language being directed at girls as young as 15” in another – a fair point about inconsistency, but one that ran in exactly the opposite direction from where it should have: toward demanding an arrest be justified, not toward demanding the abuse itself be named and reckoned with. The same press that treated Udhayanidhi’s “innuendo” as self-evidently indefensible, requiring no philosophical hand-wringing about where free expression ends, suddenly discovered nuance and civil-liberties concern the moment the target was inconvenient to the prevailing political mood in the room.

To be clear: a minor should never be doxxed, and a child’s home address and phone number being circulated online is genuinely dangerous – the press was right to condemn that, full stop. Nobody is arguing for a teenager to face the legal machinery that came for a sitting Leader of the Opposition. Those are different situations and deserve different responses.

But notice what got lost in that entirely reasonable protective instinct: almost no coverage sat with the actual cruelty of invoking a dead woman – the Prime Minister’s mother, who cannot defend herself and has nothing to do with any policy dispute to score a political point.

The ones who gave the abuses were ‘naughty kids’.

When Trisha was invoked, outlets treated the underlying disrespect as the story. When a Prime Minister’s late mother was invoked, outlets treated the backlash to the disrespect as the story. One incident produced a national conversation about political leaders weaponising women for cheap point-scoring. The other produced a redemption arc, complete with folded hands and a “second life” narrative, that closed the book before anyone had to reckon with what was actually said.

The press doesn’t need to choose between compassion for a child and honesty and freedom of expression about what she said. It needed to hold both – the same way it managed to hold both nuance and condemnation in the Udhayanidhi case, covering his arrest as high drama while still detailing the substance of what triggered it. Instead, one incident got sustained scrutiny of the words themselves. The other got scrutiny of everyone except the words.

If demeaning a woman in public life is a story worth days of coverage when the target is a film actor and the offender is a rival politician, it should be exactly as much of a story minus any pursuit of a minor, but not minus the honesty about what was said, when the target is a Prime Minister’s dead mother. Selective outrage isn’t a principle. It’s a tell.

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