Akanksha Singh

Opinion | #MeToo in India has moved beyond Bollywood to a broader conversation about the roots of sexual harassment

While there has been a backlash against Indian women sharing their experiences of being sexually harassed and the country’s sociocultural complexity makes it hard to evaluate the impact of the movement, it’s clear something has changed

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A man walks past graffiti on female empowerment in Mumbai in December 2017. In 2018, Indian women joined those across the world in sharing their stories of being sexually harassed under the hashtag #MeToo. Photo: AFP

Akanksha Singh

Published: 12:00pm, 6 Nov 2019Updated: 6:54pm, 6 Nov 2019

Last year, Tanushree Dutta, an Indian actress, made headlines when she spoke up about being sexually harassed by a veteran actor a decade ago. Dutta had first raised the issue and criticised the misogyny in Bollywood in 2008, when the incident occurred, but had been ignored by the Indian media and public.

After the #MeToo movement had swept through much of the English-speaking world, she repeated her story. This time people listened. Soon, scores of women from several industries in India came forward with their #MeToo stories. Among the accused were high-profile directors, producers, advertising executives, the CEO of the Indian cricket board and a government minister.

Nearly a year after India’s #MeToo movement gained steam, many of the men accused are back to work. Some, such as former newspaper editor and minister MJ Akbar, have filed defamation cases against the women who spoke up against them.

While, in Hollywood, producer Harvey Weinstein and actor Kevin Spacey are still lying low, it seems unlikely that there will be lasting change in Bollywood, an industry rooted in nepotism, where sexism runs rife. However, the backlash against India’s #MeToo movement extends beyond the film industry.

Indian men’s rights groups have been highlighting the possibility of false accusations. Barkha Trehan, an “equal rights activist” of the Purush Aayog (“Men’s Commission”), said in a press release in June: “Legally an Indian [man] has no rights when he is victimised [by] domestic violence, sexual, physical or mental harassment or any form of harassment [in the ] workplace”.

She added, “Men are left vulnerable [to] the whims [and] fancies of political parties and have no respite and [are] treated as third-class citizens after women and transgenders.”