Actor Kangana Ranaut was at the receiving end of a particularly nasty online attack after Congress leaders and supporters targeted her with sexual innuendos and abuses following the announcement of her candidature from the Mandi Lok Sabha seat in Himachal Pradesh.
In a post on Instagram which has now been deleted, Congress National Spokesperson Supriya Shrinate asked, “Kya bhav chal raha hai Mandi me koi batayega? (Will someone tell me what the rate system in Mandi is?)” with a particularly racy picture of Kangana Ranaut.
Other Congress supporters and leaders, too, resorted to abuses and vile innuendos to discredit the actor who has made the plunge into politics with her candidature from Mandi.
Congress functionary HS Ahir abused actor Kangana Ranaut by referring to her candidature from Mandi as, “Mandi se R*ndi.”
Islamists also joined in to abuse Kangana Ranaut.
The abusive tweets directed at Kangana Ranaut stirred online outrage, with many social media users expressing their disapproval of the Congress leaders, including Supriya Shrinate, for attacking a woman with sexual innuendos and encouraging others for the same.
Amid the raging outrage, Ms Shrinate deleted the post from her official Instagram account and tried washing her hands of the incident by claiming that the post was uploaded by someone who had access to her meta accounts.
She tried to project her blame on her parody account, claiming that the whole mischief was started by it. However, she did not explain how the mischief started by her parody account reflected on her official Instagram account where she had shared a picture of Kangana Ranaut with sexual innuendos.
Nevertheless, the entire episode demonstrates that for Congress leaders, including women politicians, slogans coined by their foremost party ideologues, such as “Ladki hoon, Lad sakti hoon”, are just campaign rhetorics aimed at swaying public opinions and casting Congress as a pro-woman party, while in reality, it is an organisation that attracts misogynistic members with low intelligence that blame their parody accounts and lean on “someone else posted from my account” excuse for their vile social media posts.