Saif Ali Khan case shows the culture of misogyny thrives

If it was Rhea Chakraborty then who was smeared; it’s Kareena Kapoor Khan now who is being character assassinated.

Based on nothing but idle gossip and ridiculous rumours, Kapoor has been targeted for somehow falling short of being the good wife. First, the TV networks (and social media trolls) made a meal of an Instagram reel that appeared to suggest that she had been out earlier that night with friends.

And so? It’s not clear what that proves one way or the other. And yet the innocuous video that captures a group of women having a nice evening with each other, has been used as fodder for attack, criticism, gossip and the most god-awful sort of rumour-mongering about Kareena Kapoor Khan.

Then the aggressive line of questioning shifted to whether she was at home when the attack on her husband took place. And if she was at home, how did she not accompany him in the autorickshaw that Saif took to hospital.

All of these comments have been offered up in the spirit of extreme judgement.

And it’s such a damning reveal about how, even in 2025, women are expected to be dutiful and demure in the most cardboard cut-out cliched way. Any woman who seemingly contradicts the imagined version of the perfect “moral” woman is feared, reviled and rejected.

In a different context, this is exactly why Sushant Singh Rajput’s then-girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty was called a “chudail” (witch). Rajput was found hanging in his Bandra residence in 2020.

TV channels emboldened by an organised online army went on the rampage. Shouty anchors were insistent despite the Mumbai police and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences deeming his tragic death a suicide, that Rajput had been killed. Chakraborty was at the receiving end of the most vicious commentary. What started as a whisper campaign against her became a crescendo of hate. Eventually, she was jailed for 28 days on the charge of procuring drugs for Rajput.

It was like a medieval witch-hunt.

When Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister in Maharashtra Nitesh Rane made a hugely inflammatory speech invoking the Rajput case while targeting Saif Ali Khan after the stabbing, his parallel was correct, but his reasons were wrong.

Rane, who virtually accused Khan of fabricating the stabbing and thereby, painted his state’s police force in questionable colours, accused the Opposition of caring for Khan and not for Rajput.

Rane’s analogy was clearly political and most of his colleagues hastily disassociated from the drift of it. But the frenzy that is being whipped up is dangerously blurring the lines between fact and fiction and gossip and evidence.

It’s not that the Saif Ali Khan stabbing — and all the subsequent contradictions and gaps in information — is not a legitimate news story. As I said on one of my own shows on the subject, when you have two big movie stars, a knife fight and a possible ransom, the pow-wow of politics, two small children who may have been vulnerable and the hot potato subject of illegal migration, it is the perfect combustible news cocktail.

Add to this the fact that a man was wrongfully arrested. Akash Kanaujia, a driver whose pictures were released initially as the suspect, is right in saying that his life has been “ruined’ by the incorrect — and very public — finger of suspicion pointed at him.

And now there are mounting questions and doubts about whether the suspected Bangladeshi national arrested by the Mumbai police is the same man who attacked Khan. These are questions journalists must ask and seek to answer.

But if our coverage and analysis are less concerned with the crime and the investigation and the very real questions that they raise, and more fixated on finding a woman to vilify, it says something big and disturbing about the entrenched culture of misogyny.

Stop looking for excuses to always find a woman to blame.

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author.The views expressed are personal