A viral comedy show clip with the “₹370 biryani” remarks has now turned into a police case. What followed was called a “controversy.” It actually should be called a revelation. It is not coincidental that we are living through this biryani moment in a political climate where rape threats are a standard tool of silencing women journalists and activists.

Tinku Khanna

June 18, 2026

At a stand-up comedy show in Gurugram, an audience member made remarks suggesting he deserved sexual intimacy after spending ₹370 on biryani during a date. The comedian on stage — whose entire craft depends on reading a room — laughed along, in fact, instigated him further. The crowd cheered. And a short clip of this exchange travelled across the internet like a lit match in a dry field.

What followed was called a “controversy.” It actually should be called a revelation.

The sequence is worth laying out plainly, because the speed of it is part of the story. The show happened; in mid-June a short clip surfaced online and spread within hours. The internet identified the audience member — Himanshu Jangra, a young tech worker — and within days his employer, a Gurugram-based design agency, announced his termination. Jangra then issued an apology, conceding he had used the wrong words and that parts of the story had been improvised for laughs; the comedian, Pranit More, apologised too. After that the machinery of the state arrived. The Maharashtra Cyber Cell registered an FIR against More, Jangra and others; the National Commission for Women took suo motu cognisance, wrote to the Haryana police, and a second FIR followed in Gurugram under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act, with both men summoned to appear before the Commission on 22 June. In the space of a week, a remark made to applause in a paying auditorium had become a criminal case. That escalation is itself part of what needs examining.

The incident lays bare something feminists have been naming for decades: the transactional logic of rape culture. A woman’s consent, in this worldview, is not her own — it is a debt she incurs the moment a man spends money on her. The currency may change (biryani today, a movie ticket yesterday, a wedding tomorrow), but the arithmetic stays constant: her body is the collateral. The sex-industry has been using the same logic for many, many years to invisibilize and trivialize the pain and harm it causes to millions of women it trafficks. That’s a different story altogether, though, not directly relevant in this context. This is not a fringe attitude held by a strange young man in Gurugram. Thousands of users pointed out that the remark revealed the idea that paying for a meal could somehow create an obligation, and that consent could be treated as a transaction. What the clip captured was not an aberration, it was an admission.

The audience in that Gurugram hall did not protest. They performed. They laughed, validated, and amplified in the same way we saw in the Boys’ Locker Room scandal of 2020, where teenage boys shared images of classmates and discussed assault as sport. The locker room is not always a private chat group. Sometimes it can be a comedy venue with paying tickets. The logic is identical: a homosocial space where the degradation of women is entertainment, where the loudest voice is rewarded, where silence is complicity and dissent are social suicide. The comedian himself has been criticised for not challenging the remarks and laughing with the crowd — because in that moment, solidarity with the men in the room was worth more to him than the dignity of an absent woman.

This is how rape culture reproduces itself: not through exceptional monsters, but through ordinary chat groups or auditoriums.

What makes the institutional response equally revealing is the reported initial reaction of Jangra’s employers — who, before public pressure became untenable, apparently considered the incident outside the purview of workplace conduct. A private matter. Something a man said on a night out, in a comedy club, off the clock. This is the logic of compartmentalisation that rape culture depends on. The office is professional. The comedy club is personal. What a man believes about women’s bodies — that they can be purchased, that refusal is ingratitude, belongs to a separate category from his performance reviews and team meetings. But the woman on that date did not get to compartmentalise. Her body was the subject of public narration in a room full of laughing strangers. 

The employer who initially shrugged was not making a neutral HR decision. They were making a political one — confirming that a man’s entitlement to women’s bodies is a private opinion, not a professional liability. It took a viral hashtag to change that calculus. Which tells us exactly how much institutional protection of women is actually about principle, and how much is about reputation management.

Jangra has since broken his silence with something resembling an apology. He admitted that parts of the story he narrated on stage were improvised — that the crowd energy, the comedian’s encouragement, the charged atmosphere led him to exaggerate. He made a mistake, he said. He lost his job.

This is worth sitting with carefully and it inadvertently indicts everyone in that room. If the atmosphere of a comedy show was sufficiently charged that a young man felt moved to embellish a story of sexual entitlement for laughs, then the room itself was already soaked in that logic before he opened his mouth. He did not introduce misogyny into a neutral space. He read the room correctly and gave it what it wanted.

This is precisely how rape culture functions as culture — not as the act of isolated bad actors, but as a set of shared expectations, rewards, and permissions that ordinary people navigate in real time. Jangra improvised because improvisation in that direction was safe, legible, applause-worthy. His apology, genuine or not, cannot undo the social fact that he was right about his audience.

Accountability without structural analysis is just a man losing a job so that everyone else can feel absolved.

The FIRs deepen this problem rather than resolve it. Once the National Commission for Women intervened and the police booked Jangra and More under provisions for obscenity and for insulting the modesty of a woman, the whole event was rerouted onto familiar tracks: find the offender, name him, charge him, and let the law perform justice on everyone’s behalf. This is the reflex that mistakes punishment for transformation — the conviction that a wrong has been answered the moment a culprit has been produced and processed. But a criminal case can only locate guilt in individuals. It cannot indict a room. It cannot charge the thousands who cheered, the comedy economy that sells this exact register of humour, or the ambient common sense that made the remark legible as a joke in the first place. Even the categories the FIR reaches for — obscenity, modesty — belong to a paternalist grammar that casts women as objects to be shielded rather than equals being denied their equality. Instant justice of this kind is popular precisely because it asks nothing structural of us. Two men are punished; the culture that made them, and that supplied its own laughter, walks free.

The body that set this in motion deserves its own scrutiny. The National Commission for Women is a statutory arm of the very state whose climate produces this misogyny — and confronted with a viral clip, it moves with striking speed: a letter to the police, a complaint, a summons, a culprit. But moving against an individual is not the same as confronting a condition. By locating the wrong in two men and pressing for their prosecution, the Commission performs concern while quietly absolving itself of the harder question — why the ground it is mandated to tend yields this crop so reliably, and what its own habitual silence has contributed to it. Because the Commission is not equally loud everywhere. It finds its voice most easily when the offender is obscure and the outrage is already loud online, and tends to lose it when the violence is corporate, or institutional, or political — when naming the harm would mean naming power rather than a young man who improvised for laughs. A commission that acts against the disposable and stays silent before the powerful is not protecting women. It is managing the appearance of protection.

And then there are the women who laughed. Some even went further — cracking jokes about dead patients, performing their own callousness as social currency. The easy response is to call this complicity. But most of the audience at such shows are very young — these were not women ground down by years of workplace survival into laughing along to keep their seats at the table. They had not yet had the time for that kind of professional conditioning. Which means what shaped their laughter happened earlier and deeper: in school, in friendship groups, on social media, in the ambient culture of growing up female in urban India today — where feminist anger is rebranded as fragility, where the woman who does not laugh is the woman who kills the vibe. It is a map of how early the work needs to begin, and how completely rape culture has learned to make its own reproduction feel like liberation.

There is a question that liberal outrage almost always stops short of: what connects all of this — the laughing room, the shrugging employer, the improvising young man, the women who found it funny — to the larger political darkness we are living inside?

The answer begins not with fascism but with something more banal: the everyday dehumanisation that capitalism normalises as common sense. Marx called it alienation — the process by which human beings, reduced to units of productive labour, lose their connection to each other, to their work, and finally to their own humanity. The worker on the assembly line does not see the person who will use what he makes. The manager does not see the worker as a person, only as a cost. The employer who looked away from Jangra’s remarks was not making an unusual decision. He was applying the same logic he applies every working day — that what happens outside the frame of productivity is not his concern, that human beings are divisible into their useful parts and their remainder, and the remainder is someone else’s problem.

This is the culture of looking away. It is not indifference — indifference would at least be neutral. It is a trained incapacity, produced by systems that reward those who stay in their lane, who do not complicate transactions with moral vision, who learn to see only what is relevant to the task at hand. The woman on that date was not relevant to Jangra’s performance review. The crowd’s laughter was not relevant to the comedian’s contract. The HR department’s initial shrug was not negligence — it was the system working exactly as designed.

And here is where the thread pulls taut. Because fascism does not emerge from nowhere. It does not require a sudden rupture, a single demagogue, a moment of collective madness. It is cultured — slowly, in the soil of a society that has already learned to look away, already learned to divide the human into the useful and the disposable, already learned that certain bodies exist primarily as objects in other people’s transactions. The ₹370 logic — that a woman’s intimacy can be purchased, that her refusal is a kind of ingratitude or even theft — is not a pre-political attitude that fascism then exploits. It is already proto-fascist in structure. It already encodes the conviction that dominance is natural, that hierarchy is deserved, that the subordinate who refuses her place is the deviant.

What both capitalism and fascism require, and what rape culture so efficiently produces, is the colonisation of minds — the process by which people internalise the values of domination so thoroughly that they enforce it voluntarily, even joyfully, even against themselves. The boy who learns that women’s bodies are transactional, the young woman who learns that feminist objection is embarrassing, the employer who learns that misogyny is personal and therefore not his problem — all of them are doing the ideological work of the system without being conscripted. This is Gramsci’s hegemony made flesh: the genius of a truly successful system of domination is that it does not need to coerce. It simply needs to make its own logic feel like nature itself.

It is not coincidental that we are living through this biryani moment in a political climate where rape threats are a standard tool of silencing women journalists and activists, where calls for violence against women who choose their own partners or religion are increasingly normalised, and where the state looks away — as it was always trained to. 

Fascism does not arrive fully formed. It is assembled, piece by ordinary piece, in rooms exactly like that one.

Tinku Khanna is a social activist and member of Groundxero Collective.

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