Sex and the Supreme Court: How the Law is Upholding the Dignity of the Indian Citizen by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette India
Published: 2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

SEX AND THE WORKPLACE

The Beast in Our Midst

How India’s MeToo Movement Broke the

Silence on Workplace Sexual Harassment

NAMITA BHANDARE

Nobody saw it coming and nobody could have predicted its impact. The complaint itself went back all the way to 2008 when Tanushree Dutta, a former Miss India, complained that the actor Nana Patekar had groped her on the sets of a film Horn Ok Pleassss, 1 while she was filming a song.

Patekar, she said, had managed to bully his way into the song and insert an ‘intimate’ step that wasn’t there in the original script. When she protested and tried to leave the sets to go home, her car was stopped by workers from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a parochial party.

There’s a video of dozens of screaming, angry men beating down on her car, deflating the tyres and smashing its windshield. You can see Dutta in the back seat, her mobile phone in one hand, the other on her driver’s shoulder as if to reassure him – or perhaps herself. Police in uniform stand impassively as one man jumps on the roof of her car. It is terrifying to watch. 2

Dutta complained to the Cine and Television Artistes’ Association (CINTAA). There was no response. The story made no headlines. She eventually got married, moved to America and the story was forgotten.

In September 2018, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for the US Supreme Court were broadcast live from Washington. The hearings did not reach a wide television audience in India. Yet, in a global, instantly interconnected world, the accusation by Professor Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her brought forward memories of America’s MeToo movement of a year ago, and seemed to have acted as a trigger for some women in India.

It was in the middle of these hearings that the Tanushree Dutta incident resurfaced when she gave an interview to an entertainment channel revisiting the old incident with Patekar.

Just how much had changed in a decade is evident by how quickly Dutta’s interview was picked up and how fast it went viral.

CINTAA scrambled to issue a belated apology, saying that its earlier decision was ‘not appropriate, as the chief grievance of sexual harassment wasn’t even addressed.’

But the real turmoil was taking place on social media.

‘Some incidents that take place even a decade ago remain fresh in your memory. What happened with Tanushree Dutta on the sets of ‘Horn OK Please’ is one such incident – I was there,’ began a 13-tweet thread on 26 September by the journalist Janice Sequeira.

Sequeira was bearing witness to what Dutta had been saying all along, hinting at the Indian film industry’s dark underbelly – its infamous ‘casting couch’. She lamented: ‘It could have possibly been the first instance of a Bollywood actress calling out sexual predators, and her voice was silenced by more powerful men who continued to have flourishing careers. Now she’s found her voice again. Should we listen?’

It was a rhetorical question because regardless of whether anyone was listening, an unprecedented number of women began speaking up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.