Picture it. A woman walks onto a public stage. She questions the government. She takes on her opponents. She defends her party without flinching.

Within minutes, the debate quietly changes direction. Her arguments vanish. Her clothes take their place. Her age comes under discussion. Her marriage gets dissected. Her appearance gets mocked. Soon her private life is being dragged through the mud, in full public view. And there it is; one of the ugliest faces of Indian politics.

A man raises his voice, and he's called forceful. A woman does the same, and she's arrogant. A man with ambition is decisive, visionary. A woman with ambition has her motives questioned, as if her real crime is refusing to stay quiet.

Indian politics has run this game for far too long. A woman can speak, contest, win, even reach the highest office in the land. But the instant she becomes outspoken, the conversation stops being about policy. It becomes about her clothes, her character, her relationships, her body. There's an unwritten rule at work: if you can't beat her, humiliate her first.

Call a man corrupt or incompetent, and it's dismissed as hard-hitting debate. Let a woman leader look her opponent in the eye and answer back, and the weapons change instantly. Policy disappears. Her marriage and her body become the argument.

Abuse becomes the easiest weapon in the room. This sickness has no party affiliation. The whole political ecosystem is infected by it. A crude remark about a woman from one's own camp triggers outrage, statements, demands for action. The same filth thrown at a woman from the rival camp is met with silence. Respect for women has stopped being a principle and become a switch, on for ours, off for theirs.

Sunanda Pushkar's public life was swallowed by sensationalism before it was ever treated as her own. Jayalalithaa, one of the most powerful chief ministers India has produced, was still routinely reduced to her gender. Mayawati has been taunted with caste and gender prejudice tangled together. Uma Bharti has absorbed personal attacks that had nothing to do with her record.

One can disagree with Kangana Ranaut. Her politics are fair game for criticism; no public figure is above scrutiny in a democracy. But disagreement is not a license to throw every insult available at a woman simply because she is one.

Criticising a woman politician is democracy. Tearing apart her private life is bad manners. The line between the two should be obvious. Our politics keeps pretending it isn't.

We're fluent in the language of women's empowerment when it costs nothing. Conferences. Slogans. Stages lit up with promises. Then the tickets get distributed for the next election, and the doors quietly shut again.

Reservation for women is a real step forward. But seats aren't the whole question. The atmosphere women are asked to work in matters just as much.

Say she wins the ticket. Say she wins the seat. Say she becomes a minister. Then what? Does she get the respect her male colleague takes for granted, or does prime-time television debate her outfit while her marriage gets fed to the rumour mill? That's the swamp our politics is still stuck in. And democracy pays for it.

Somewhere, a capable woman is looking at all this and deciding it isn't worth it, that she'll spend more energy defending her private life than doing the public's work. A man rarely has to make that calculation. His marriage doesn't become national debate just because he ran for office. That asymmetry is the problem.

We complain that good people won't enter politics. Fair enough. But do we actually make room for them once they try? Especially for women?

The more women who enter politics, the harder it becomes to silence any one of them with a few insults. Numbers are strength. Organisation is strength. And economic independence may be the greatest strength of all; a woman with her own income, her own network, is far harder to intimidate. Millions of women entrepreneurs across India are proving this daily: building businesses, creating jobs, making decisions, answering to no one's favour. That's what empowerment actually looks like, not a slogan shouted from a stage.

Better education. Easier access to credit. Real opportunity. Real safety. And when a woman enters politics and disagrees with you, fight her ideas, not her clothes. Question her work, not her character. Criticise her policy, not her private life.

No one is above criticism in a democracy. But criticism and abuse are not the same thing. Debate and vulgarity are not the same thing. That distinction is quietly disappearing from our public life.

The hypocrisy is almost theatrical: a leader delivers a morning speech on respecting women, and by evening his own supporters are hurling filth at a woman from the opposing camp online. Then comes the standard defence: we didn't say it. That's not an answer. If the house is on fire and the owner says "I didn't light the match," does the house survive?

Parties can't keep treating their troll armies as strangers. When the abuse repeats day after day, and the silence from the top never breaks, that silence is its own message. Sometimes silence is the loudest form of support there is.

Women don't need to be put on a pedestal in politics. They don't need immunity. They need to be treated as equal citizens, full stop. If they're wrong, say so. If they're corrupt, investigate them. If they govern badly, vote them out. But don't come for them simply because they're women you assume won't fight back. Because they're fighting back. Going to court. Building businesses. Claiming their space. The old politics of humiliation is running out of road.

Misogyny isn't the weather. It wasn't handed down by nature. People built it, which means people can take it apart, starting by retiring the laziest excuse in the book: "that's just politics, these things happen."

No. Enough has happened. Enough characters assassinated, enough private lives auctioned off for clicks. It's time politics went back to arguing about the things that actually matter.

Punishing a woman for being outspoken and ambitious doesn't just fail her, it fails democracy itself. The real fight should be over ideas, not insults. Policy, not private lives.

And here's the reckoning worth sitting with: in a democracy where half the population has to price in the cost of abuse before it opens its mouth, the microphone may be switched on, but the voice coming through it is still only half heard.