Moment to movement

|
  • 0

Moment to movement

Friday, 28 December 2018 | Pioneer

Moment to movement

The #MeToo crusade in India may have taken time but is now a tidal force to reckon with, one that is becoming a bottom-up campaign by women to establish gender parity

Exactly a year ago, an annual rundown of trends had found a low hit for the #MeToo hashtag in India, the density confined largely to the Western world. As Hollywood women, who had been abused by producer Harvey Weinstein, decided that they had acquired a standing despite the exploitation in their early careers and it was time to call him out for his outrageous wrongdoing, Bollywood was deafeningly silent. Yet a year later, the hashtag has become gale force at home, not just in the rarefied confines of social media chatrooms but in the real world, particularly the backrooms of even the regional film industries. Beginning with actress Tanushree Dutta, whose complaint against co-actor Nana Patekar held good because it violated workplace code (a shooting location) and employee contracts rather than offscreen negotiations of power play, it quickly stoked a reactive wave among other abused women, spilling over this time to other industries, most notably the media, academia, hospitality and corporates. It even took down the then MoS for External Affairs and at one-time considered an unassailable and “unputdownable” editor MJ Akbar. It is this percolation through the societal trellis that makes our #MeToo not just a moment in time but a movement for respect and true inclusion at the workplace.

Sexual harassment and violence graduated from being just a conscience pricker or moral outrage on discussion boards to forcing a course correction in the real world. Thanks to the faceless women who spoke up against their abusers at the workplace, the offenders had to step down from their exalted positions in industry and governance with the delivery of retrospective justice. For the first time, ordinary women tamed a medieval expression of domination and coercion into being a despicable misfit of the modern world. Sex as a power tool in the office is on its way out and hopefully will lead to an assessment of talent as it is rather than the body it inhabits. #MeToo even fostered a counter movement of men who took to the confession box, admitting they had violated boundaries or unknowingly offended women around them. For the first time, gender neutrality didn’t seem like a slogan but a societal sensitivity that will shape the way we build a new world. And most importantly, for the first time again, it forced a revision of the feminist movement itself as regular women asked their privileged counterparts why they still tolerated predatory men and remained tight-lipped despite being aware of their odious character. Did success mean only breaking the glass ceiling and becoming an acolyte of an elite preserve of Fortune 500?

The Bollywood crusade took time to shape up because unlike Hollywood, it was bottom-up instead of top-down. Most of our A-listers, while acknowledging the casting couch syndrome, claimed immunity on the ground that they had not been subjected to exploitative advances. So traumatised and ashamed are they of this mostly unwilling but sometimes willing compromise that they shove it under the carpet. But the security, exposure and the connectedness of a digital hashtag has given everybody else a right to speak up and claim redress in a country where the legal due processes for sexploitation are either loosely implemented or given the go by. Worst, primary charges levelled by a woman are not considered worthy of a serious probe, often passed off as an attempt to settle scores in a relationship gone wrong. Yet inquiry is needed to establish veracity. Or else, even a serious complaint will be tainted by the same brush of speculation and an attempt at flighty fame. And because the #MeToo in India, by virtue of the digital constituency it serves, has a Savarna and class orientation to it, there has to be an on-ground diversity about it by including women from the countryside and backward castes, for long inured to the idea of incurring the wrath of those in power. This patriarchal hitback is the biggest challenge to renegotiating gender hierarchy and our #MeToo movement needs to work on male antipathy than expect empathy. Already there is much talk that there cannot be too many fallen men and the poor “victims” are but pardoned for a momentary lapse of passion but “fallen women” are an easy label to apply. Some surveys have shown that #MeToo might adversely impact the hiring of women employees at the workplace, as if they represent a threat for demanding equality. Still, there has been a silver lining in the form of the Malayali film industry women forming their own collective and the Producers’ Guild of India codifying a professional rulebook. Like everything global, we have indigenised #MeToo.

Sunday Edition

CAA PASSPORT TO FREEDOM

24 March 2024 | Kumar Chellappan | Agenda

CHENNAI EXPRESS IN GURUGRAM

24 March 2024 | Pawan Soni | Agenda

The Way of Bengal

24 March 2024 | Shobori Ganguli | Agenda

The Pizza Philosopher

24 March 2024 | Shobori Ganguli | Agenda

Astroturf | Lord Shiva calls for all-inclusiveness

24 March 2024 | Bharat Bhushan Padmadeo | Agenda

Interconnected narrative l Forest conservation l Agriculture l Food security

24 March 2024 | BKP Sinha/ Arvind K jha | Agenda