The Curious Crusade of Renu Bhatia Against Ashoka Professor Mahmudabad

Renu Bhatia, the chairperson of Haryana State Commission for Women, is now at the centre of a contentious storm over First Information Reports (FIRs) against Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad of Ashoka University, Sonipat.

The controversy, sparked by the professor's online reflections on ‘Operation Sindoor’ and Indo-Pakistani relations, has thrust Bhatia and her commission into a harsh spotlight. Apart from Bhatia's complaint, one FIR, filed by BJP village sarpanch from Sonipat, also reportedly stemmed from an alleged private conversation with the professor.

That a mere critical reflection, particularly from an academic, can incite such a disproportionate and punitive response from the state – or those drawing authority tenuously from it – has become a dispiritingly familiar feature of our current times; a ‘new normal’, if you will.

Bhatia's interventions, and her vocal public defence of her actions, demand closer examination – not merely for what they reveal about her grasp of her mandate but for the light they shed on prevailing intolerance and the instrumentalisation of state institutions for purposes clearly far from their stated objectives.

Bhatia repeatedly asserts her unimpeachable integrity and unwavering commitment to her duties – past, present, and future. "I will not let any daughter of my country bow down," she declares. "Whoever emits the stench of betrayal in the name of the country's daughters... I will keep speaking out against them." 

Such claims, common from public officials, ring hollow against a record that, at a glance, appears more attuned to political expediency than to unyielding justice or the consistent protection of all women. 

This isn’t to doubt her sincerity, which can coexist with a profound misunderstanding of one's role, but to question its remarkably selective application.

Past

Before becoming chairperson of Haryana women’s commission in January 2022 – her term later extended “until a further order”, implying perhaps political favour over performance – Bhatia’s career covered media and brief film work. An anchor for Doordarshan, a stint playing Benazir Bhutto (she proudly calls herself “Bhajpa ki Benazir”), these experiences preceded her formal political career. 

Politics, however, was apparently “never out of the picture”, her family rooted in the RSS and BJP. This lineage smoothed her path from Faridabad municipal councillor and deputy mayor – although her second council run in 2010 was reportedly foiled by Congress fielding “six women candidates named Renu Bhatia” – to her current, prominent position.

Bhatia’s leadership of the women’s commission has drawn controversial public attention. A viral video from two years ago showed her in an unseemly altercation with a woman police officer over a marital dispute, while another from last year showed her threatening to deport an NRI over his wife’s complaint. 

While she commendably pursued a sexual harassment case against a Jind school principal, her zeal seems inconsistent. For instance, her commission initiated an FIR against Sameena Dalwai, a professor, for “outraging the modesty” of students (all above 18 years) at OP Jindal Global University, also in Sonipat, by showing them dating app profiles during a gender discussion – an accusation stretching the definition to a Victorian degree.

More telling, given her current indignation for “women in uniform”, was her notable reticence on a 2017 Republic TV panel. When Arnab Goswami demanded, as part of his daily prime time harangues, that she label convicted Dera Sacha Sauda chief Ram Rahim a rapist, Bhatia consistently refused.

Did a high court rape conviction not warrant such a descriptor from a self-proclaimed champion of women’s dignity? Or does speaking truth to power vary with the power in question and political affiliations? 

Her silence regarding a judicially confirmed rapist with political clout contrasts sharply with her condemnation of a professor for a nuanced reading of a government press conference. Where was this fierce protector when Ram Rahim’s followers rampaged, or when Haryana’s wrestler-daughters, alleging sexual harassment by a powerful BJP MP, were dragged on the streets while he retained his seat? 

The past, as Bhatia herself seems keen to invoke, has a rather inconvenient habit of offering up such contrasts, casting a rather long shadow on present protestations of undiluted concern for all 'daughters'.

Present

Returning to Professor Mahmudabad, Bhatia’s five-hour press briefing and TV interview with India Today’s Preeti Choudhary offer a veritable trove for students of political rhetoric and manufactured outrage. 

Certain words from Mahmudabad’s text – “illusion”, “hypocrisy” and the invented “painted faces”, absent from his post but central to Bhatia’s grievance – are brandished as proof of insult to “India’s daughters” and the nation. Pressed by Choudhary to find ‘painted faces’ in the professor's writing, Bhatia evaded: "No, what does hypocrisy and illusion mean then? Maybe my English is not better... What does this mean then?"

This feigned confusion over "polished sophisticated English," posing as a simple woman bewildered by academic jargon, is a classic anti-intellectual populist trope. 

The implication – “intellectuals” with “high-brow English” apparently hide nefarious, anti-national designs, transparent to the “common person” who presumably speaks plain “general Hindi”. 

"Where does the meaning of what he has written go?" she demands as she seems unwilling to engage with the text's actual meaning, preferring a sinister interpretation fitting a narrative suspicious of critical inquiry.

By equating Ashoka University to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), she cleverly sought to use the existing anti-JNU, and as a corollary ‘urban-naxal’ narrative to add wind to her sails. She stopped short of declaring that ‘India’ (liberal elites) might find the professor’s words acceptable, but ‘Bharat’ (the real peoples) would not.

The attack sharpens with repeated, sneering references to Professor Mahmudabad as ‘Raja-babu’ and an unsubstantiated focus on his grandfather’s alleged funding of the Muslim League. "His grandfather funded the Muslim League in Pakistan," she asserts, urging the media to "go behind all this." 

This is a familiar tactic — discrediting someone by supposed tainted ancestry, a form of collective culpability marking them as inherently suspect. The "elite Muslim intellectual English-speaking liberal" is a caricature resonating within the Hindutva framework, long preoccupied with conditional minority belonging and "mental allegiance" to a narrow Hindu Rashtra.

Bhatia’s fascination with Professor Mahmudabad’s "mentality" is revealing. "I scrolled more things about him just to judge what kind of mentality he has," she states, as if social media reveals a mind’s workings, or as if such judgment is a women’s commission chairperson’s task. 

This focus on "mentality" and "background", not the alleged offense, crudely echoes Golwalkarian concern with an internal, immutable "nature" supposedly rendering certain groups alien.

The professor's perceived "attitude of being critical of the BJP" – often conflated with being "anti-national" – is deemed offensive, not just his words. His crime, it seems, is not what he said, but who he is: an independent thinker, a minority member, daring to articulate a view deviating from the official narrative.

Throughout the India Today interview, Bhatia evades questions. She repeatedly asks the anchor what the offending words "mean" but refuses to explain her interpretation of how Mahmudabad’s phrasing insults women officers or is seditious. 

The anchor cites his posts; Bhatia cites her police complaint, as if its filing makes it true. "I understood its meaning," she declares. "At such a delicate time of Operation Sindoor, I understood it." Her understanding appears impervious to textual analysis.

More perplexing, during her press briefing, was her sudden injection of the phrase "caste equations." "It is a matter of surprise that when any daughter of our country progresses in this manner, we start indulging in caste equations. Why is it only about the daughter of a particular caste moving forward?" she mused, a comment tangential to Mahmudabad’s posts. 

Could it be a "sharp missive" on the contentious caste census, where her party, the BJP, was defensive? This plausible interpretation suggests the professor’s alleged transgression offered a platform to signal allegiance on unrelated political fronts. Such performative pronouncements often prioritise signaling virtue over relevance.

The reckoning

Thus, we reach the crux — Renu Bhatia, chairperson of the Haryana State Commission for Women, should safeguard women’s rights. Yet, while institutional energy is spent pursuing a professor for words needing prodigious misinterpretation to be offensive, Haryana's women face a grimmer reality. 

The state’s sex ratio at birth (SRB) plummeted to an eight-year low of 910 in 2024, from 923 in 2019. This isn't an abstract statistic – it is a brutal denial of a girl child’s right to live, resulting from entrenched patriarchal values, illegal sex-selective abortions, and systemic devaluation of female lives.

Where is the five-hour press conference on this crisis, considering it is during her tenure that this record low was achieved? Where is the relentless pursuit of those perpetuating this silent annihilation?

It is a profoundly disturbing inversion of priorities when a body established to protect women theatrically policies academic speech, while the silent, systemic violence against the most vulnerable – unborn or infant girls, in this case – continues unabated. 

Such actions are not isolated misjudgements but symptoms of a deeper malaise where democratic institutions serve partisan ends, their mandates reinterpreted to stifle dissent, not uphold rights. 

The "stench of betrayal," to use Bhatia’s phrase, might lie not in a professor's words, but in the chasm between an institution's proclaimed duties and its impact. One wonders if the true "illusion" and "hypocrisy" are in a women's commission more exercised by semantics than by the denial of life and dignity to Haryana's daughters. 

Grandiose claims of protecting every daughter ring hollow against such stark realities, questioning the actual purpose of such commissions when their energies are so flagrantly misdirected from pressing, life-and-death issues.

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