Sexual harassment is not about sex. It is about power.” Demi Moore in Disclosure drilled in the fact that harassment is an equal-opportunity affair. So while Captain Poonam Kaur’s allegations of sexual harassment have clouded the Indian army’s reputation, the fact remains that as long as women are barely tolerated in the military and unable to wield real power, such instances will recur. The Indian army has been recruiting women for the last 15 years, initially to fill up junior slots that were falling vacant. In their 10 years of work, women officers can rise only up to the level of a major, so their male colleagues have no fear of reprisal.

Unless reporting to a woman becomes a more established norm, women will continue to languish in low-status, subservient roles. Even if many combat roles are unavailable to women (for a variety of debatable physiological and social reasons), the military is a complex edifice and most other functions can be competently performed by women. Modern warfare has muddied traditional distinctions between combat and non-combat roles. For instance, over 40,000 American women served in the war against Iraq, and many previously closed occupational specialties have been opened up to women.

There are less than a thousand women in the Indian army. There is no reason why India cannot extend ladders of opportunity to women in the military. They can be employed in the engineering, ordnance, signals, army service, education, intelligence or legal branches — the fact that they are not, in sufficient numbers, only testifies to the military’s tacit buying into sexual straitjackets that the rest of the world has long discarded. In every other field, women have fought enormous odds, from those who head corporations and nations, to those who soldier on in all kinds of occupations, to prove the obvious — that sex differences have no bearing on professional ability.