Raksha Kumar | SabrangIndia

Why the ‘Me Too’ movement in India is succeeding at last

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 06:13:10 +0000

Centuries of entrenched patriarchy cannot be upturned in a month. But this country finally looks ready for a feminist overhaul.

This year, I’ve been a part of the Me Too revival in India, having joined countless other women in naming and shaming our abusers.

Like many Indian feminists, I’ve found the past few months exhilarating. Our gutsy movement might finally rewrite entrenched patriarchal norms, at least in workplaces. A government minister resigned, a Bollywood production house shut down, senior newspaper editors stepped down, a millionaire casting director was sacked, academics were let go from universities – and the list of major impacts continues with fresh allegations still unfolding.

Attempts in 2017 to ignite a Me Too movement in India were nowhere near as effective. These began in October 2017, shortly after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke in the US, and scores of women drew attention to the scale of sexual abuse with #MeToo posts on social media. That month, an Indian law student at the University of California Davis, released a list on Facebook with names of senior academics accused of sexual harassment.

The LoSHA list

Raya Sarkar’s LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia, as it came to be known on Twitter) left many feminists uncomfortable, including myself.

It was a crowd-sourced list – an open Google spreadsheet, which could be edited by anyone with the link. It named perpetrators in one column and survivors in another, but in almost all cases it lacked details of specific allegations. In principle, its open-access structure also meant that anyone could add a survivor’s name to the list, even without their consent.

Not only did the alleged perpetrators not face any legal actions or university sanctions, some of the renowned academics named on the list even garnered sympathy: it was seen to violate their rights to due process. The Me Too movement in India failed to gain traction and eventually dissipated.

What’s different this year? Many feminists have contended that Me Too allegations by Indian women weren’t taken seriously by the press or the public in 2017 because Dalit women, like Sarkar, led the campaigns. In contrast, women steering the 2018 movement are from influential castes.

Dalits are historically oppressed castes. A Dalit woman who names her abuser is more likely to face social ostracisation, disbelief and stigma. But Sarkar’s 2017 LoSHA was vital. It laid the groundwork for this year’s advances. For many of us who outed perpetrators of abuse and harassment in 2018, it showed us precisely the landmines to steer clear of.

“It showed us precisely the landmines to steer clear of”

This year’s movement began in September, when a Bollywood actor alleged that a senior male colleague had sexually harassed her in 2008. Soon after, allegations of abuse surfaced among well-known stand-up comedians.

The first few women who named perpetrators on social media were inundated with private messages from other women detailing their own experiences of harassment and assault. Some remained anonymous; others wanted their stories to be public. The women receiving these waves of allegations became ‘gatekeepers’ for the Me Too revival.

This is a crucial cog that was missing in 2017’s LoSHA campaign. This loose collective of gatekeepers spend time talking to survivors and learning more details of the time, place and nature of abuse before outing perpetrators. They ensure that survivors are not re-traumatised, but that their stories have enough details that other people can corroborate them.

This time, the only Google spreadsheet is a list of lawyers and mental health professionals who have volunteered time and services to support survivors.

Another crucial difference in the ‘second wave’ of this movement is the larger number of women who have mustered-up the courage to name their abusers and harassers. Thanks to Sarkar’s work last year, the burden of stigma had already started to shift onto perpetrators. The first disruption was necessary for the second to make strides forward. LoSHA loosened the lid of the bottle.

“This time, the only Google spreadsheet is a list of lawyers and mental health professionals who volunteered to support survivors”

In October 2018, Mobashar Jawed Akbar, a former leading newspaper editor, resigned from his post as a junior foreign minister after 27 women accused him of sexual harassment. More than half of these women were not anonymous. (Akbar denied all allegations and filed an ongoing defamation case against the first woman to accuse him).

More women are outing perpetrators online, but the Me Too movement in India is also pursuing court cases and knocking on the doors of Internal Complaints Committees at their workplaces. More than 20 women have also pledged to testify in court against Akbar, for example.
The 2017 LoSHA list was criticised for not following “due process” regarding alleged perpetrators. But this “due process” emphasis is also insufficient, too narrowly defining what justice looks like for survivors, and incorrectly assuming it means the same thing for all women. This year, many survivors have come forward about their experiences explicitly stating that they do not want to pursue legal cases. Some only want an apology, or their jobs back.

The POSH Act

In 2013, India’s parliament passed the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, also known as the POSH Act. But its implementation has been negligible. The Me Too movement’s current wave has pushed from its start for this to change – via Twitter and public statements, letters and petitions to government authorities.

In response, on 24 October the government convened a group of ministers, headed by home minister Rajnath Singh, to examine legal and institutional frameworks for dealing with workplace sexual harassment. The National Commission for Women also reached out to several women on Twitter and accepted their petitions, promising to take action.

This may be nothing more than lip-service. But recent supreme court verdicts decriminalising homosexuality and allowing menstruating women into shrines suggest those in power are finally taking gender equality seriously. Though there are still many pressing questions.
Many of the men who have been accused of harassment or assault in both waves of the Me Too movement in India are powerful, yet supposedly progressive, figures the media industry. What made these ‘liberal’ men ignore the basic principle of consent in their own workplaces?
“What made ‘liberal’ men ignore the basic principle of consent in their own workplaces?”

For decades, the veteran broadcast journalist and editor Vinod Dua has criticised religious inequality, caste-based discrimination and undemocratic processes in India. He too has been accused by multiple women of sexual harassment. He has denied all charges.
Criticising government politics or social norms was easier for these men than looking critically at their own behavior, practices and thoughts. These men were not taught how not to be abusive, while women were told to be always on guard. These men could transgress accepted social boundaries, while women had to tolerate abuse today for the promise of a better tomorrow.

Women’s spaces, whether community spaces or friendship networks, have always had their whisper networks. Me Too campaigns have dared to share these online, using social media to alter the social order. Of course, centuries of entrenched patriarchy cannot be upturned in a month. But this country finally looks ready for a feminist overhaul.

Raksha Kumar is an independent journalist, writing on human rights, gender and politics. She has reported for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, TIME magazine, Christian Science Monitor, DAWN, Caravan, The Hindu and South China Morning Post. Follow her on twitter @Raksha_Kumar.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/

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A new way to target activists in Chhattisgarh: Charge them with exchanging old notes for Maoists

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 07:45:45 +0000

Seven activists from Telangana have been arrested by Bastar police. A complaint has been filed against lawyer Shalini Gera.

On December 25, seven members of the Hyderabad-based civil rights body, Telangana Democratic Front, were arrested by Chhattisgarh police. The group included three lawyers, an independent journalist and three research scholars from Osmania University. The police charged them with assisting the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and claimed to have recovered demonetised currency notes worth Rs 100,000 from them.

The Telangana Democratic Front has denied the charges. The seven men were part of a fact-finding team that was on its way to Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district to investigate the alleged encounter of a hearing impaired teenager, said N Narayana Rao, general secretary of the Civil Liberties Committee, which is part of the Telangana Democratic Front. The team was not carrying such a large amount of currency, he said, and the police has framed them to prevent them from reaching Bijapur.

Two days later, Shalini Gera, another lawyer who travelled to Bijapur to investigate the same encounter killing, was informed by the Bastar superintendent of police that a complaint had been filed against her. The complainant accused her of exchanging old Rs 1,000 notes worth Rs 10 lakh for the Maoists.

Gera described the accusations as “a continuation of the harassment” faced by human rights activists in the region.

The encounter killing

On December 16, Bijapur police announced that a team of security forces had killed an “unidentified and armed Maoist in uniform” in the jungles of Metapal in Gangalur thana after a “fierce gun battle”. The residents of Metapal recognised the teenager as 13-year-old Somaru Pottam and carried the body to Gangalur police station, demanding an enquiry.

Receiving no response from the police, the parents of the teenager petitioned the Chhattisgarh High Court in Bilaspur. In the petition, Pottam’s parents said that the teenager was returning to Metapal on the morning of December 16 with another boy. While they stopped to gather forest produce that is considered to have medicinal properties, the security forces ambushed them. Pottam’s companion managed to escape but Pottam, who is hard of hearing and suffers from skin ailments on his lower body, could not run fast enough. He was captured.

The petition alleged that Pottam had been interrogated for an hour. Being hard of hearing, he could not answer many questions. In full view of the villagers, three security personnel shot the teenager from a distance of less than five feet, killing him instantly, the petition said. Pottam was then dressed in a Maoist uniform and a 12-bore gun was placed next to the body.

The parents decided to bury the body of their child, instead of following their custom of cremation, so that the evidence could be preserved. On December 23, the Chhattisgarh High Court in Bilaspur ordered the exhumation of Pottam’s body for another postmortem, which was done on December 26.

Activists working in the area claim that this rattled the security forces.

Arrests and intimidation

On December 25, a day ahead of the court-ordered postmortem, the seven-member team of the Telangana Democratic Front was on its way to Bijapur from Hyderabad. Narayana Rao said he received a call from one of the team members, 48-year-old Prabhakar Rao, a lawyer in Hyderabad High Court. Prabhakar Rao told him that the Telangana police had arrested them in Dummugudem village in the state’s Khamman district around 9.30 am, and handed them over to Chhattisgarh Police in the Konta area of Sukma district by 7 pm.

“We think they wanted to show the arrest in a state which has a Public Security Act,” said Rao.

The seven men were booked under the Chhattisgarh State Special Public Security Act, which vests law enforcement agencies with draconian powers. The activists have been charged under sections 8(1), 8(2), 8(3) and 8(5) of the Act for allegedly assisting the Maoists. The police has claimed they possessed banned currency notes worth Rs. 100,000 and Maoist literature.

Rao dismissed the charges. “It is normal for people to carry some amount of cash while travelling,” he said. “It was certainly not a heavy amount. It was obviously not a lakh of rupees.”

He also questioned the police’s move to arrest anyone on the basis of possession of old notes. “Why is it wrong to carry currency notes? After all, the government said old notes can be exchanged till December 30,” he said.

In a statement on December 27, the Chhattisgarh police claimed that the activists had been arrested from Dharmapenta village in Sukma district and not in Telangana. The police alleged the activists were members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and assisted the organisation financially. The seven men were presented before a court in Sukma, which sent them to judicial custody. “We are opposing their bail application,” said Jitendra Shukla, additional superintendent of police, Sukma.

Lawyers from Hyderabad have reached Dantewada to take legal action to secure the quick release of the seven activists.

Another complaint

A day after the Telangana activists were arrested, less than 200 kilometres away in Bastar’s commercial capital Jagdalpur, about a dozen police personnel stormed a community hall named Goel Dharamshala. They demanded to search a room which had been occupied by three members of a legal team – Shalini Gera, Rishit Neogi and Nikita Agarwal. Gera was representing Pottam’s parents in the High Court, and the team had just returned from Bijapur where his body had been exhumed for a repeat postmortem. Since the police did not have search warrants, the lawyers refused to comply.
Later, in an undated letter to the Superintendent of Police, Bastar, a complainant Vinod Pandey alleged that one of the lawyers, Shalini Gera, had exchanged old Rs 1,000 notes worth Rs 10 lakh for the Maoists that day in Goel Dharamshala.

Gera is a founding member of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid group that arrived in conflict-ridden Bastar in 2013. Since then, the group has provided legal representation to several Adivasis free of charge. In February this year, Gera and her colleague Isha Khandelwal were forced to exit Bastar after sustained intimidation by civil vigilante groups.

“I fear that this is a continuation of the harassment already faced by us, and other human rights workers, academics, lawyers, writers, tribal rights activists in the Bastar Division,” said Gera in a December 27 letter to the National Human Rights Commission.

In an email, she also pointed out that the arrangements for the legal team’s stay had been made by the Divisional Commissioner of Bastar. The team had travelled to Metapal village with Pottam’s parents and government officials. “The complaint against me is a rather imaginative one,” she said, “but considering that I had spent the entire Sunday in the company of officials from Bijapur – the SDM [sub-divisional magistrate], Dy Collector [Deputy Collector] and the Tehsildar of Bijapur, it is altogether impossible to imagine how I could have found time to sprint across to the jungles of Dantewada to meet topnotch Naxalites to take their demonetised currency notes for exchanging.”

History of intimidation

Somaru Pottam’s case is one of the many cases of alleged police excesses in Bijapur that have come to light in the past few months. The district had emerged as a flashpoint in the conflict between armed guerrillas, commonly known as Maoists, and security forces in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region. Ordinary Adivasis, who are viewed with suspicion by both the security forces as well as the Maoists, have borne the brunt of the violence.

Road connectivity in the district is poor and many villages are nestled inside the forests, making it tough to investigate human rights violations. Even when villagers make the arduous journey to the district headquarters to lodge a police complaint, they are often dismissed. In September, two young Adivasi human rights activists from the region were reportedly harassed by the police for filing cases alleging the security forces had killed innocent people.

In December 2015, the Bastar police declared they wanted to rid the region of Maoists and announced Mission 2016. Since then, four journalists have been arrested and two others, including Scroll.in contributor Malini Subramaniam, have been harassed and forced to relocate from the region. Activist-scholars Bela Bhatia, Nandini Sundar and others have been threatened and cases have been slapped against them by Chhattisgarh police.

“Bastar is proving to be an island of anarchy in the heart of democratic India,” said Rao of the Telangana Democratic Front. “The situation is more dire than we can imagine.”

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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