Could it be a coincidence that two modern democracies, each calling itself a secular republic, are expending a fair amount of energy, around the same time, in pronouncing on how much of their bodies adult females should be allowed to keep covered or uncovered in public? In India, the minister of culture and tourism - a combination worth thinking about - had declared that women visiting from foreign countries should not be wearing skirts in small towns for the sake of their own safety, only to clarify after protests, mainly on the social media, that he was talking about the necessity of maintaining a certain modesty of female attire in the specific context of religious places. In France, the country has been divided along religious, racial and political lines over a temporary ban on women wearing the burkini - a kind of beach-wear, usually worn by Muslim women quite freely all over the world, which covers considerably more of their heads and bodies than the scantier bikini. This ban was imposed by thirty or so municipalities on the French Riviera, and has now been overturned by France's highest administrative court as a violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms. Most of the country's banning mayors want to contest this verdict. Armed policemen have been going around the beaches of France asking women to take off some of their clothes, while the more scantily clothed people around them shouted at these hapless women to obey the law or go back to their countries of origin. This has been happening, of course, in the name of women's freedom, upheld by feminists, socialists and right-wingers alike, all invoking the acts of terror committed recently in France by religious extremists.

Compared to the layers of irony in such a situation, the Indian minister's warning, and subsequent clarification, would have sounded positively benign, had it not come in the wake of a series of pronouncements on Indian culture made by him of unabashed bigotedness. In both the cases, Indian and French, the ideas of rights, freedoms and security have not only proven to be full of absurd (though no less alarming) contradictions, but they have also given rise to expressions of authority and prejudice projected on those eternal objects of prohibition and protection: the bodies of women, abstracted from their capacity to decide for themselves what they want to wear.