On Wednesday, at the televised third debate among Republican Presidential hopefuls, Republican Party aspirant for next year’s Presidential election Tim Scott, introduced the world to a woman he said was his girlfriend.
When many wondered about the identity of the mystery woman who was accompanying Scott, the politician currently serving as the junior United States senator from South Carolina since 2013, his campaign issued a statement saying the woman who greeted Scott onstage after the debate and posed for a picture with him “is his girlfriend Mindy.”
The mystery woman was later identified as Mindy Noce, a design and renovations manager.
The emergence of the aspirant’s girlfriend almost upstaged the debate and other aspirants in the running. But, not many took potshots at the candidate for having a mysterious girlfriend.
However, the disclosure also brings to fore a question for us Indians: Will we be tolerant if any of our frontline politicians announced to the world about having a girlfriend.
Congress politician Shashi Tharoor is often at the centre of crude jokes and insinuations about his private life whenever he is pictured with a good-looking woman. Often, the haters don’t even bother to show any semblance of decency while commenting on his alleged links.
More recently, TMC Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra, a divorcee, who is facing a backlash from her right-wing colleagues in the Parliament, over allegations of impropriety for having allegedly shared her email username and password with some acquaintances, has been the subject of gossip and ridicule for her relationships.
The amount of scrutiny that she has faced is massive. But nobody has so far asked advocate Jai Anant Dehadrai, with whom she had a steady relationship for about three years before they broke up, to explain his conduct,
Dehadrai, who is a key witness in the case against Moitra, has spun several tall tales about his former girlfriend. Their fight, it is now clear, started over who got ownership of their pet Rottweiler named Henry after the breakup.
But the lawyer has been trying hard to hurt Moitra politically. Strangely, while everyone is eager to paint Moitra with whichever brush they can lay their hands on, Dehadrai is conveniently being given a long rope.
Shouldn’t his personal life be subjected to the same amount of scrutiny as Moitra’s? More important, do Indians need a better playbook in so far as the issue of girlfriends or boyfriends of our political leaders is concerned?
