Rita Bahuguna Joshi, president of the Uttar Pradesh Congress, has strange ways of expressing gender solidarity. After the BSP government distributed Rs 25,000 to Dalit rape victims, Joshi protested the paltriness of the gesture with some incredible crassness. The women should “throw the money at Mayawati’s face and tell her ‘You should also be raped and I will give you one crore rupees,’” said Joshi, in a speech broadcast on several TV networks.

Her “angry” remark conveyed worlds of cold contempt that the Congress should scramble to dissociate itself from. She was crassly casteist in her pitch to the victimised Dalits, and sexist and offensive in the extreme in her violent language against Mayawati. In one stroke she managed to insult the victimised women she was demonstrating support for (diminishing their tragedy to score political points), unravel her own reputation and discredit her party. The last election, we know, signalled a drastic change with the Congress regaining part of the ground it was thought to have irreversibly lost in UP, in which Dalit voters played a big part. In its own interests, and for the sake of a more mature politics, the party must take exemplary action against Joshi. Sonia Gandhi has so far expressed regret over the remarks, while accusing the Mayawati government of political high-handedness; but this is an opportunity for the Congress, as a responsible party, to show that certain utterances carry heavy political costs, that they can wreck individual careers.

Mayawati, in her singular career, has faced all too many of these takedowns, and dished them out herself. Now, Joshi has been placed under14 days custody pending investigations for allegedly promoting social enmity, insulting a woman’s modesty and insulting a person of lower caste. The issue has become a political flashpoint, as angry protestors torched Joshi’s house. To defuse situations like this, it is vital that all our political parties make it abundantly clear that such remarks have no place in our public discourse. Such trash-talking must be unanimously condemned and revealed as politically ruinous, if our public discourse is to progress.