The Big Story: Unsafe space

On Tuesday, veteran Hindi-film choreographer Saroj Khan made a curious statement seeming to defend the practice of exchanging sexual favours in return for roles in movies. Euphemistically called the “casting couch”, multiple commentators have pointed to the existence of the malpractice in the Indian film industry. “This has been going on for ages, it’s not new,” Khan said. “Someone or the other always tries to take advantage of girls. Government officials also do this, why are you only targeting the film industry? This industry provides livelihood at least – does not rape and abandon you.”

Khan said this when asked about her views on the Telugu film actress, Sri Reddy and her protest against the practice of powerful people in the film industry demanding sexual favours from female actors. In a drastic move, Reddy had stripped outside the Telugu Film Chambers of Commerce on April 7.

In response to Khan, Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury joined the debate, adding that the practice was not limited to the film industry. “This happens everywhere in workspaces,” she said. “Don’t imagine that Parliament is immune or any other workspace is immune. It’s time India also stands up and says #MeToo,” she added, referring to the popular movement in the West in which several women had taken to publicly speaking about sexual harassment, especially in workplaces.

In this Chowdhury is correct. And she should be applauded for breaking the omerta code around sexual harassment in politics. To illustrate how risky even the simple act of speaking out is, consider that the actor Sri Reddy has already been penalised, with the Telugu film industry’s Movie Artistes’ Association threatening to act against anyone who works with her.

Sexual harassment is a widespread problem in India’s workplaces. Cases of sexual harassment have been reported in some of India’s most elite companies including The Energy and Resources Institute or TERI, Wipro, ICICI Bank, Infosys and the Tata group.

Policies to deal with sexual harassment in the Indian workplace are either completely absent or are weak. In 2015, for example, when Union minister Maneka Gandhi wanted to make it mandatory for companies to disclose whether they have put in place a committee to inquire into sexual harassment complaints of women employees, her request was turned down by her own cabinet colleague, Arun Jaitley.

For long India has treated sexual harassment with not enough seriousness. Till 1997, India had no explicit laws against workplace sexual harassment. The first step in this direction came from the judiciary. Sensing a lacuna, the Supreme Court framed a law against sexual harassment. However, the Supreme Court’s rules were flouted widely. In 2013, therefore, Parliament passed the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act. This too, unfortunately, is widely ignored and the Union government itself has pointed to serious flaws in the way the act is implemented. Unsurprisingly, surveys have found that sexual harassment is widespread in Indian workplaces.

In the West, the #MeToo movement was driven by institutional failures, with governments and corporations failing to responds to women’s concerns about sexual harassment. If anything, India has done much worse in that regard and Indian women would be well within their rights to demand a #MeToo moment of their own.

Punditry

  • Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Beijing should be seen in the context of the flux of global geopolitics and domestic murmurings about the “softening” of the Union government’s Chin a policy, writes PS Raghavan in the Hindu.
  • India can endure neither the Supreme Court’s loss of legitimacy nor all the attempts being made to overcome it, writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express.
  • India’s north-south divide is a major political problem, argues Mihir Sharma in Bloomberg Quint.

Giggle

Don’t Miss

Lethal dose: Indian farmers are dying because the government is regulating pesticides poorly, report Mridula Chari and Vinita Govindarajan.

“Raja was a woodcutter who leased half an acre of land from a relative to grow cotton in Tamil Nadu’s Perambalur district. He usually sowed groundnut, but in 2017, he decided to grow cotton for the first time.

On the morning of October 24, he went to the field to spray pesticides on the cotton plants which had grown 6-feet tall. He emptied 10-15 tanks of pesticide that morning and came home feeling dizzy and faint, his wife Meenakshi recalled. He vomited and had diarrhoea. At 3.30 the next morning, Raja’s family took him to a government hospital in an autorickshaw. The doctors told them Raja’s condition was extremely precarious since he had sprayed too much of pesticide. ‘They said it had gone up to his brain,’ said Meenakshi. ‘They said they could not do anything.’

The family then took Raja to a private hospital. He died within minutes of arrival.”