Has the #MeToo movement in India failed?
At Jantar Mantar, a historical landmark-turned-protest site in New Delhi, a familiar script is playing out. For the last month or so, India’s top athletes in wrestling have taken to the streets in the capital city–for the second time–to protest against the chief of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) and a six-time MP of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh. They allege he sexually harassed them at their place of work, and accuse him of silencing them for speaking up. In the police complaints the wrestlers filed against Singh are allegations of him touching the athletes’ breasts, stalking and making sexually-coloured comments.
The struggles of the wrestlers–which include stellar Olympians Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia–aren’t in isolation. In a country with a chronic problem of sexual violence, where a woman is raped every 18 minutes, the wrestlers have inadvertently become a part of India’s #MeToo movement. The movement started in 2017 with a list of sexual harassers in academia, and now includes high-profile allegations in the fields of Bollywood, classical performing arts, art, wildlife conservation and the Indian journalism and entertainment industries.
BRUSHED UNDER THE CARPET
For sports, this is the first. “I have not seen any protest like this in Indian sports before,” Sharda Ugra, senior sports journalist, tells The Established. “This is unprecedented for sure. But the way it’s playing out is very similar to the recent years of women complaining of harassment and abuse, and them being seen as perpetrators instead of the accused being held accountable.”
Sure enough, in the immediate aftermath of the athletes’ accusations, Singh denied all accusations. Last week, the athletes said that the Oversight Committee set up to investigate their claims against Singh were, instead, asking them to provide proof of their own sexual harassment. “They asked us if we had video or audio proof,” one of the wrestlers told The Indian Express.’”Without proof, what can we do?"
Another wrestler told the media outlet that the internal committee gaslit her and told her that Singh is, in fact, a “father figure” and that his behaviour such as inappropriate touching is done “in all innocence”.
A 2020 news report found 45 sexual harassment complaints registered at the Sports Authority of India in the past 10 years, 29 of which were against coaches. A 2019 government report says that such cases could be higher, and that “many times, cases against coaches also might have gone unreported.”
At a media event in March this year, Vinesh Phogat–a Padma Shri recipient and the first Indian woman wrestler to win gold in both Commonwealth and Asian Games, who is now leading the protest–told the audience why they didn’t speak up sooner. “In our country, there’s a lot of focus on proof,” Phogat said at the event. “Nobody in this country likes a woman speaking up. Now everybody is asking us: ‘What’s the proof?’ Isn’t a woman admitting that she faced this proof enough? If somebody harasses you on the streets, do you go back to them and ask them to harass you again to record the proof?”
“Why don’t you take proof from someone who did this?” she added.
THE BHANWARI DEVI CASE, #METOO AND BEYOND
India’s first #MeToo (of sorts) goes back to 1992 when five men from the dominant section of the ancient Hindu caste system gang-raped government social worker Bhanwari Devi in the village of Bhateri in Rajasthan. Devi was advocating against child marriage in the village as part of a state-sponsored programme. It involved stopping the child marriage of the daughter of one of her alleged rapists. Before the accused were given a clean chit in 2018, Devi was subjected to a long, arduous process to file the FIR and was discredited by the accused and their supporters. But her struggle provided the definitions of sexual harassment at workplaces in 1997 for the first time in Indian history.
The 2012 gang rape and death of a young woman in Delhi–which got her four rapists and killers sentenced to death in 2013 and executed in 2020 –further provided stronger rape laws in India, and led to the passing of Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) [PoSH] Act in 2013. The Act makes it mandatory for any workplace to have an internal committee to address sexual harassment.
In 2017, when the floodgates of #MeToo opened up on social media, these sexual harassment laws resurfaced. Bollywood producer Vinta Nanda, who wrote Tara, the famous TV soap opera from the ’90s, known for its portrayal of a modern Indian woman, tells The Established that #MeToo gave her a voice even though she had first come out with rape allegations against actor Alok Nath in 2005 in an interview with Bombay Times. “[Back then], there was no such thing as social media and almost everybody I know had read [the article],” she said. “The funny part is, everyone ignored it and pretended like they hadn’t.” Her career suffered for years, she adds, until #MeToo exploded on social media in 2017 and she spoke up again. “And this time, I was heard,” she says.
But Nanda, who made a documentary called #Shout revolving around the movement, said that #MeToo made life tougher for her. Her projects fell through and people in the industry refused to work with her. At the same time, Nath was cleared by the Mumbai police and went on to file a defamation suit against Nanda along with a compensation of ₹ 1 and a restraining order. He features in an unreleased film that is ironically titled Main Bhi, in which he plays a judge who’s against sexual harassment.
Nanda did not continue her case because of financial and emotional reasons, and her career continues to suffer. “Other than long-drawn trials that would lead to shame lobbed at not just me but also my friends who bore witness to what had happened, we were aware there was going to be no other outcome,” she shares.
A similar script followed other survivors of #MeToo as well. Bollywood actor Tanushree Dutta accused fellow actor Nana Patekar of sexual harassment in 2008 but Patekar was cleared by the police and is now scheduled for a Bollywood comeback film called The Confession. Former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, who was accused of sexual harassment by a former Supreme Court employee, not only sat on the Supreme Court bench to hear his own case, but was also cleared by the courts.
Journalist Priya Ramani, who had accused her former editor-turned-politician MJ Akbar of sexual harassment, was slapped with a defamation case but, in 2021, in a rare move, won that case. "This shows us that women can withstand any pushbacks …That it's not that easy to shut us down and silence our truths," Ramani told German publication DW. However, despite losing this case and quitting as an MP during #MeToo allegations, Akbar continues to be in the public limelight as an “eminent thinker” and works with a media company.
There’s much to say about India’s laws that punish crimes against women, including sexual harassment. A 2020 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found that if Bhanwari Devi, the Dalit activist, were to be attacked today, she would be unlikely to get justice even now.
“The implementation of the prevention of sexual harassment law at workplaces has become a farce. Few organisations have a policy and are doing the bare minimum for compliance,” Audrey D'Mello, a legal expert for victims of sexual violence and founder of Majlis Legal Centre, tells The Established.
Resistance against #MeToo–apart from becoming a punchline for fringe toxic masculine online movements like the one started by Andrew Tate–also played out through a simultaneous men’s rights movement in India that claims #MeToo cases are false and meant to harass men. Indian courts, additionally, come with their own baggage of misogyny and patriarchy, where, in the past, men accused of rape have been acquitted because the court thought it was “inappropriate” for the victim to sleep after the assault, or wore what the court deemed “sexually provocative dresses”.
D’Mello says that women continue to feel unsafe about coming forward against their peers or superiors and awareness around sexual harassment is abysmally low.
Nearly a third of Indian women have faced sexual violence, according to the National Family Health Survey-5, but surveys show most Indians believe women should tolerate harassment like eve-teasing “as a normal part of life” and that the onus of abuse is on the survivors.
“Most people have unrealistic expectations from the victims. They only believe a victim if the incident is brutal and she has evidence. Inappropriate behaviour, comments, jokes etc are not taken seriously,” says D’Mello. “However it’s important to realise that in the case of sexual violence, it always starts with small incidents and then builds up. Unless we deal with every case of sexual harassment, we will never be able to address India’s rape problem.”
#METOO WAS GROUNDBREAKING, BUT IT ISN’T WITHOUT ITS FLAWS
The #MeToo movement has been criticised for leaving out millions of women from underprivileged castes and class who work in informal sectors. Abirami Jotheeswaran, General Secretary of the All India Dalit Women’s Rights Forum – National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, tells The Established that India’s sexual harassment laws were built on the backs of marginalised women. “But they’ve been left out of it,” she said. “If you want to bring social change through #MeToo, it cannot happen without inclusivity and intersectionality of gender and caste. Only the collective voice has the power to hold those accused accountable.”
According to D’Mello, India is currently witnessing different women’s movements in different places and spaces, all of which are necessary. “We need lots of autonomous movements that may not necessarily share the same name, but are appealing to different sections of society,” says D’Mello. “The wrestlers’ protests has created quite a stir but it’s a long fight ahead.”
Back in Delhi, at the wrestlers’ protests, Phogat told the media that there are many young women who have complained of sexual harassment but they won’t share their names in public. “The background, the villages we come from, people are not that educated there,” said Phogat. “And [the girls] have to live there. They can’t move to London or [Mumbai]. If their names are out, stepping out of the house can become very difficult.
Nanda says that instead of empowering women, the silence surrounding abuse has possibly grown after #MeToo. “Patriarchy is so deep-rooted in our culture that not one woman in the government, including the Minister of Women and Child Development, has said a word in support of the wrestlers in the last one month,” she says.
But despite it all, Nanda still has hope. “Things are better today for us because women before us fought unending battles, more often losing them than winning them,” she says. “Things will be better for women of the future because of the battles we are fighting, for our rights and safety, today.
Published by: The Established
Rpeorter: Pallavi Pundir