Himanshu Jangra Was Only Speaking the Language India Taught Him

Poor, unlucky Himanshu Jangra. The 370-rupee-biryani storyteller couldn’t even stay out of trouble in a country that despises women.When Himanshu Jangra told an audience of mostly men—goaded on by standup comic Pranit More—that he had expected something in return—paisa vasool—from a girl for whom he had bought a Rs 370 plate of biryani and the “funny” clip was shared online, the outrage algorithm exploded. Peak Gurgaon content, More said. Correction: Classic Indian man.A man from Jangra’s company (who the internet had hunted down and bombarded with messages) promptly made a video about company values and announced that Jangra was sacked from his job. In a country where companies routinely gaslight their women employees for filing legitimate sexual harassment complaints and allow powerful perpetrators to slither back into their wood-panelled corner offices, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at this dismissal. So many who were accused publicly by multiple women of sexual misconduct, coercion, and workplace abuse in #MeToo likely thanked their stars that they live in India where they don’t have to be accountable for their actions, forget being sacked.If all of us had to list men who should be removed from employment because they had recounted misogynistic stories to other men or because their hands stayed put on our bodies undeterred when we clearly said no, most Indian companies would have no male employees. Here, men are known to throw acid on women who say ‘no’ .Does Jangra’s former company have a code of conduct that it circulated among its employees warning them that they can be sacked for misogyny? Does it have a zero-tolerance policy on casteism, transphobia, and religious bigotry too?Yuvraj Mehta’s Death Shows Even the Rich Are Not Beyond State FailurePoor, unlucky Jangra. He couldn’t even stay out of trouble in a country that hates women and facilitates their abuse in every way possible. He traded his job for a plate of chicken biryani. Now that’s what I call full paisa vasool. In this country, women’s families PAY so their daughters can marry same-caste-same-religion men only to be beaten, tortured, and raped with legal sanction. We condone dowry, domestic violence, and marital rape. But these are inconsequential issues. A judge of the Madras High Court recently defined ‘mental torture’ as a Hindu wife removing her mangalsutra while her husband was alive. No judge has yet defined living with an Indian man as mental torture. Indians traffic, maim, and murder their wives and daughters because they can. In 2026, we still refer to street sexual harassment as ‘eve-teasing’. Three-year-old girls are raped routinely; boys as young as 12 have learned how to be rapists.Rape culture is pervasive here and nobody, including the politicians who make the laws, understand consent. In the latest Telugu blockbuster Peddi, the camera crawls over every inch of Janhvi Kapoor’s body in the name of male entertainment. She cries when lead actor Ram Charan kisses her non-consensually. Even feminist directors like Anurag Kashyap are drawn to the ‘different’ story of a woman stalking and falsely implicating a man for rape rather than the starkly different picture of everyday reality. It almost feels boring to spotlight women’s suffering, right? 'Peddi': Janhvi Kapoor's Agency Is The Film's Biggest VictimIndian families are cesspools of violence and misogyny. Abusing underage female domestic workers is a national sport for privileged, educated urban Indians. The ill-treatment of women is aided by the state. The latest National Family Health Survey removed key indicators of how women and girls are perceived and treated in this country. There’s no mention of population sex ratio or the sex ratio at birth and lots of other health data related to women.Obviously the government wouldn’t have done this if the data painted a Norman Rockwell picture of family. And all this is not even counting all the little boys abused and treated violently in this same milieu.But we conduct online trials every day and ignore the real systemic issues. One day it’s all guns blazing at the woman who confesses she falsely accused a man; the next day it’s a boys’ locker room discussion about extracting money’s worth from a woman. There’s no systemic or online support for women journalists who are abused every day for doing their job. Or for the Ambedkarite influencers who want you to understand why B R Ambedkar burned the Manusmirti. Or for the Muslim men who are lynched by the saffron-tinted mob claiming they have a legitimate reason for the murder.Boys Locker Room: Yet Again, Trolls Divert Focus From Real IssuesDalit rapes get a small paragraph in the inside pages of our newspapers. Bodies of rape victims are quickly cremated by the state before evidence can be collected that clearly points to the upper caste perpetrators of violence. What lessons of feminism do you think Jangra from Gurgaon (or wherever else he is from) learned growing up in this country that tells little boys they deserve it all and little girls that they should cover up and keep quiet? As for the idea of paisa vasool? Privileged Indians have rebranded a necessary survival tactic in a country with acute poverty into a nationalistic mantra to extract and squeeze as much as we can, from whomsoever we can. I’ll say it once again: Jangra was only speaking the language this country has taught him. (The author is the founder of India Love Project and on the editorial board of Article 14. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Himanshu Jangra Was Only Speaking the Language India Taught Him

Poor, unlucky Jangra. He couldn’t even stay out of trouble in a country that hates women & facilitates their abuse.

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