Politics is a glitch. We’re told we’re living in a brand-new India, one defined by UPI transactions, semiconductor dreams, and high-speed rail. But every time the national discourse takes two steps into the future, a politician opens their mouth and drags the whole OS back to a local host from 1952.

The latest system failure comes from the Rajasthan Assembly. Sandeep Sharma, a BJP MLA from Kota, decided that the state’s fiscal policy needed a dash of 19th-century patriarchy. During a budget discussion, Sharma opted for an analogy that would make even the most hardened cynical observer wince. He claimed the BJP’s budget was like a "son" who stays home and builds the family legacy, while the Congress’s budget was like a "daughter"—someone else’s property, a liability destined to leave.

It’s a classic move. Low-effort rhetoric for a high-stakes room.

The pushback was instant, predictable, and entirely justified. Congress MLAs didn't just walk out; they stayed to point out the obvious rot in the logic. When you categorize public spending through the lens of gendered "assets" and "liabilities," you aren't just being sexist. You’re admitting that your understanding of economics is tethered to a social structure that most modern economies are trying to patch out of existence.

Here’s the friction. Rajasthan isn't exactly swimming in spare cash. The state is staring down a fiscal deficit that would make a Silicon Valley burn-rate look conservative. We’re talking about a debt burden that has hovered around ₹5.37 lakh crore. That’s the real hardware problem. Instead of debating the ROI on infrastructure or the spiraling costs of social safety nets, the floor of the House was occupied by a man comparing spreadsheets to offspring.

It’s a peculiar kind of brain rot. Kota, the city Sharma represents, is the nation's pressure cooker for engineering aspirants. It’s where kids pull eighteen-hour shifts to learn the logic of the future. Yet, their representative is busy using the assembly floor to broadcast an outdated firmware version of "The Patriarchy 1.0." It’s a jarring disconnect. We want the world to invest in our "digital stacks," but the cultural stack is still running on a fragmented, buggy legacy system.

The apology, if you can call it that, followed the standard PR script. The "taken out of context" defense. The "I respect women" patch. But the damage is structural. These remarks aren't isolated bugs; they’re features of a political culture that views half the population as a metaphor for "spending" rather than "earning."

Think about the trade-off here. Every minute spent arguing over whether a budget has a gender is a minute not spent discussing why Rajasthan’s youth unemployment remains a stubborn thorn in the side of the "India Rising" narrative. The state needs a radical update. It needs to figure out how to transition from an agrarian-heavy economy to a tech-resilient one. Instead, it gets a lecture on why sons are better than daughters because of their supposed "retention value."

The irony is thick enough to choke a server farm. While the center pushes "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao" as a core brand pillar, its own MLAs are treating daughters as the universal shorthand for a bad investment. It’s a marketing nightmare. You can’t sell a "Global Tech Hub" if the people writing the laws still think in terms of dowry-era economics.

Investors don’t just look at tax breaks; they look at the stability of the social environment. They look at whether the leadership is capable of existing in the 21st century without a script. When a ranking official uses the budget—the most serious document a government produces—to indulge in casual misogyny, it sends a signal. The signal is: We are not as modern as our slide decks suggest.

We’ve seen this movie before. A politician says something prehistoric, the internet explodes for 48 hours, the opposition gets a few good soundbites, and the actual fiscal mess continues to pile up in the background. The Rajasthan budget remains a complex web of debt, subsidies, and ambitious promises. It deserves a rigorous, data-driven autopsy. Instead, we’re stuck debating a metaphor that belongs in a dusty museum of bad ideas.

If this is how we’re going to talk about the trillions of rupees meant to build our future, maybe we should stop pretending it’s about the numbers at all. It’s about the optics. It’s about the ego. It’s about a political class that would rather resort to a sexist trope than explain a balance sheet.

How many more software updates can this discourse take before the whole system just crashes for good?