The Double Standard of Accountability: If a Joke Costs a Man His Job, Why Does a Woman Get a Pass?

PRANIT MORE CONTROVERSY — Imagine sitting at a table. You’ve been living a good respectful life. You know that your time on this Earth will eventually come to an end. You decide to do good even after passing. Even in death you decide to be giving something very important to society. You take a pen and sign a piece of paper—you have now donated your body to science. Your body will now be the source of learning for people who save lives. Doctors. Bhagwaan ka roop—impersonation of God. Your lifeless body will teach young doctors to give life to someone else. You are giving up your dignity out of pure love for humanity.

Now, cut to a cold room in a medical college. Students take an oath to treat you with utmost respect and learn while maintaining your dignity.

But one of the students standing over you does not look at you with respect. Instead, she looks at you naked, lifeless body and sees a joke. She looks at your private parts and laughs.

This is not a nightmare. Or a story I made up. This was a true story, narrated proudly on a public stand-up comedy stage. All while the girl speaking knew the stage wasn't the end of it. She was asked to post this on various social media platforms. And she agreed. She consented to have this filthy, vulgar ‘joke’ to be sent out for  more people to watch.

The Girl Who Almost Got Away

The medical student Sejal Pawar, a future doctor, studying at the famous KEM Hospital in Mumbai, openly mocked a male cadaver’s body given to her college for studies. She made this  vile comment about this cadaver on a public platform, knowing it will be aired for millions of people to watch.

What she did was more than just a violation of medical ethics. When you become a doctor, you take an oath—Hippocratic Oath—to treat human life with absolute respect—both in life and in death. If a future doctor can look at a helpless, dead human being and make filthy jokes about them for cheap laughs, how will she treat a living, breathing patient?

But here is the most terrifying part of this entire story: Sejal Pawar almost got away with it.

When the video of the show first came out, nothing happened to her. No one called her college. No one demanded her suspension. She went back to her normal life, completely safe. She continued living as if nothing happened—probaby proud of ‘making it’ online—because at the time nothing happened to her.

Why? Because society looked the other way. She was protected by a silent double standard.

She only came into the limelight because of a boy.

Himanshu

In that exact same comedy show, a 22-year-old corporate employee named Himanshu Jangra also spoke on the microphone. Months after Pawar. 

He told a crass, toxic story about spending ₹370 on a biryani for a date and expecting a "return on investment."

What Himanshu said was regressive and wrong. And the internet reacted instantly. Within hours, people found his social media, tracked down his company, and he was fired immediately. His career was destroyed in a single day.

The worst part? He never had any complaints against him at work—neither by the opposite gender or the same one. And he was considered a ‘good employee.’ People who knew him did not believe he could say something like he did. He probably said what he did to appear ‘cool’ or create an image among the friends he was with. And that cost him his career.

Only after Himanshu’s life was turned upside down did some bold people on the internet look back at videos from the stand-up comic and ask a serious question:

“A man’s career is ruined overnight for a bad dating joke. But what about a girl—once in the same room—who desecrated the dead? Why is no one talking about her?"

If Himanshu Jangra had not faced that immediate backlash, no one would have ever looked at Sejal Pawar. She would be sitting in her classroom right now, wearing her white coat, completely unbothered. 

A man was broken by the system overnight, while a woman—who committed a far worse ethical crime—was handed a shield of silence just because of her gender? Even now, while the corporate man is unemployed, the college dean says they cannot take direct action, and she has simply been sent "home with permission."

The Panic vs. The Privilege

The way both of them reacted to the anger shows the real double standard.

Jangra knew the system would destroy him. He didn't try to argue. He immediately deleted all his social media accounts, deactivated his profiles, and vanished from the internet in total panic. He knew, as a man, he had no shield.

But Pawar reacted with absolute privilege. Knowing she was a girl and might get away with it, she actually made a video to talk to the public. She tried to get ahead of the situation with a hollow apology. In her video, she said, "I am not going to justify what I did." But right after saying that, she immediately started making excuses for her dirty jokes. She thought her video would fix it, but it backfired completely.

You cannot outsmart the internet. Your digital footprint never goes away. Because she stood her ground instead of hiding, people started digging deep into Pawar’s past. And what they uncovered was even more shocking.

People on the internet found out that she might have used a fake caste certificate to get her seat at the prestigious government medical college. An online witness pointed out a simple fact: "Pawars are not ST (Scheduled Tribe)." 

If this is true, it means she didn't just mock the dead—she allegedly stole a medical seat from a poor, deserving student who truly earned it. Now, she is not just facing anger; she might face a real police case for fraud.

The Ringmaster of the Circus

We cannot talk about Sejal and Himanshu without talking about the man holding the microphone: Pranit More, the stand-up comedian whose show Pawar and Jangra were at when they made these crude comments.

A comedian is supposed to find humor in everyday life. But Pranit More chose to facilitate inhumanity. He stood on that stage, encouraged these disgusting comments, and fed into the toxicity. Instead of calling out Jangra, More awarded him for being funny. Instead of stopping a medical student from throwing her ethics in the trash, he leaned into it for views.

And what about the audience? The room was full of ordinary citizens. When Jangra complained about Rs. 370, when Sejal mocked the dead, the crowd did not gasp. They did not stay silent. They laughed and clapped. It shows a deep rot in our society where we find the objectification of a woman, and the humiliation of a helpless, donated body "entertaining"—until a camera captures it and forces us to see how ugly it looks.

This entire incident is a mirror to our society, and the reflection is ugly.

Look at the three players in this modern circus. Himanshu Jangra acted toxic, Pranit More acted greedy, and Sejal Pawar violated the most sacred oath in medicine. Jangra was fired, More got an FIR filed against him, yet Pawar seems to have been handed a shield of protection simply because of her gender.

If Himanshu had not faced that sudden, explosive backlash, Pawar’s horrific comments would still be buried in silence, and More would still be counting his profits from that night.

The scales of justice in India are dangerously broken. We have created a world where a man loses his livelihood over a ₹370 biryani comment—rightfully so—a comedian gets rich off vulgarity, and a future doctor can mock the helpless dead and get sent home with a gentle slap on the wrist.

If our medical councils, our corporate leaders, and we—the public—do not demand equal accountability for everyone, we are sending a chilling message to the country: Truth does not matter, public trust does not matter, and your dignity, even in death, is just a punchline for a girl with a microphone.