New Delhi, Aug. 19 -- In today's politics, when opponents can't win on substance, they fall back on an old, ugly strategy: weaponizing the women connected to their targets. This dynamic rests on a premise as old as patriarchy itself: a woman is not an autonomous figure in public life, but a point of vulnerability to be deployed against a man.

By turning female public figures into proxy targets, political operatives score cheap rhetorical points while stripping women of their agency, dignity and hard-earned professional individuality.

It is a quiet slide from open gender discrimination into a subtler kind of misogyny, one where a woman's visibility is tolerated only so long as it can be turned into political ammunition against her male p...