The Indian variety of the campaign seems to be nixing justice and fairness.
MeToo has notched up a high-profile success. Junior Minister for External Affairs M.J. Akbar’s resignation has been actuated by dollops of partisan outrage, agenda journalism and a genuine sense of hurt felt by some among the several women who came forward to allege harassment at his hands when he was a powerful editor. Journalists being one of the more active groups on social media, women at the receiving end of allegedly unwanted advances were all professional journalists. (Henceforth, don’t say dog doesn’t eat dog. Ha! Ha! It often does.) Also, without the active role of an English language daily, it is doubtful if the copycat MeToo would have made much headway. Quite a few members of the media, Bollywood and the ad agencies are on the back foot after they were outed by their alleged women-victims.
In fact, going by social media posts, a woman has threatened to expose Amitabh Bachchan, with the actor responding with an angry challenge, daring her to do so only at the pain of severe legal consequences. Probably the little known woman is seeking her own 15 minutes of fame by throwing muck at the greatest Bollywood star who shows no signs of slowing down even at the ripe old age of 75-plus. Big money has invariably defied age, especially when you are Amitabh Bachchan, nee Saxena, a good Allahabad Kayastha.
Indeed, despite all the noise, MeToo India has essentially remained confined to the major urban centres in the country. Social media is its most reliable tool, daily newspapers its propaganda vehicles to sustain it beyond the limited confines of the essentially English-speaking audiences. Yet, it is undeniable that like in most other fields, the English language media wields influence far disproportionate to its actual reach. The newspaper which helped seal the fate of Akbar was not even one of the top selling dailies. Yet, it was able to dictate the course of events in MeToo as it had done in the past in several other scams and controversies.
However, this is not to suggest that sexual harassment of women takes place only in the three professions which have been gripped by the MeToo contagion. Nor is it anyone’s case that women in rural and semi-rural settings are safer working in the fields or in middle class homes or in small and medium industries and retail stores. Rural women have had to face sexual humiliation for centuries, including in some parts where it was customary for a low-caste married woman to spend the first night with the village head who invariably belonged to a higher caste. Power structures determined the status of women in rural India. MeToo so far has meant nothing to these long-suffering sisters, daughters and mothers of city slick women.
Misogyny was ingrained in the society at all levels, poor or wealthy, educated or illiterate. Men using violence at the drop of a hat against their wives was not a rare phenomenon in households across all social and economic barriers. Remember sati was committed by widows, not widowers. It is noticeable that the highest court in the land only the other day felt obliged to remind us that wives are not to be treated as chattels, and husbands are not the swamis (owners) of their wives for them to treat them like non-persons. Gender equality might have been granted by law, but for men to internalise that truth would take a long while. Like it or not, a majority of men do treat women as inferior beings.
But a major complaint against MeToo India, is that unlike the country of its origin, the accuser here has most unfairly appropriated the role of both prosecutor and judge as well. Akbar has had to go without being given an opportunity to prove his innocence. The argument that 20 women have accused him does not still validate the charge of even a single woman unless it is tested on the anvil of the organised justice system. This is what he intends to do by filing a defamation case against Priya Ramani, the first accuser who set the ball rolling against him. Without passing judgement on the veracity or otherwise of his accusers, it needs to be said that the lynch mob mentality militates against the basic tenets of an organised society. For all we know, Akbar might well be the serial woman-attacker that he is accused of being by a score of women, but until proven by thorough investigations the charge will remain unsubstantiated—and a mere charge.
In sharp contrast, even though the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sounded truthful and genuine, investigations, albeit rushed and far from thorough, exonerated Kavanaugh, who immediately went on to become the pivotal ninth member of the highest court in the US. Earlier, in the pre-MeToo age in the 90s, Anita Hill’s charge of sexual misconduct against Judge Clarence Thomas, President George H.W. Bush’s nominee for the US Supreme Court, was also dismissed in an equally perfunctory manner after a superficial inquiry.
However, the point is that in both cases, the home country of MeToo went through the motions of an investigation before giving a clean chit to the accused who then went on to become life-time Supreme Court justices. Here in India, we condemned a man, virtually ruining his career, on the basis of accusations of sexual misconduct some two decades ago. How fair is that I will leave it for you to decide!
Meanwhile, some of the other MeToo targets are fortunate. For, people like Suhel Seth, Vinod Dua, Jatin Das, Chetan Bhagat, et al, are self-employed and have nowhere to resign from.
THAROOR THE POMPOUS ENIGMA
Former Junior Foreign Minister Shashi Tharoor sure is a man of many riddles. From as yet unresolved riddles attendant upon the mysterious death of his third wife Sunanda Pushkar, to his penchant for posing wordy riddles to attract attention to his writings, there seems nothing simple and straightforward about the Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram. Social media he uses as a tool to market himself as a man of letters, churning out books at regular intervals.
But his strategy to make news by posing riddles about big and unpronounceable words seems to be succeeding in a country which is yet to shed its inferiority complex about the English language. But the English speaking countries would have remained disdainfully unimpressed if Tharoor were to use words like “floccinaucinihilipilification” or “hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia”.
Neither in spoken or written English are such heavy-duty words welcome anywhere else but India thanks to our wasteful obsession with “good” English. Their newspapers and even books will not make you rush to the voluminous dictionary after every other sentence, but Tharoor the great intellectual seeks literary honours for using big and arcane words.
Indian-American children admittedly do well in annual Spelling Bee contests, but Tharoor is well past the age to flaunt tongue-twisters at every turn to market himself. One riddle is one too many for all of us to resolve. Periodic frivolousness of this nature does not become an otherwise gifted and knowledgeable writer who nonetheless has a dark side to him which often lets him down.