This MeToo movement may not be perfect. It needs to travel to areas of darkness within the city, and outside it, to thanas, courtrooms and workplaces where women are less privileged and more vulnerable.
A new moment is born and it belongs not to the minister who finally stepped down from office after days of brazening it out and trying to intimidate his accusers, not to the government that remained sullen and silent even as a storm built and raged around it. It belongs to India’s MeToo movement and the women whose fierce courage in breaking a long and heavy silence has given it shape, this irrefutable power. Make no mistake, the resignation of Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar nearly 10 days after he was first named on social media by a woman journalist as a sexual predator, is a watershed moment. It establishes a new benchmark in India’s politics. So far, ministers have stepped down, or been asked to go, following serious allegations of corruption. And corruption has, so far, been defined as the abuse of public office for private gain that is more often than not, and at the bottom of it, financial. The resignation of Minister Akbar, following testimonies on social media against him by women of sexual harassment, widens the ambit of “corruption”. It will now, rightly, include behaviour and conduct that disrespects a woman and violates her dignity, consent and boundaries in the workplace. Of course, the Supreme Court had recognised sexual harassment as an offence, laid down the Vishakha guidelines in 1997, and the Sexual Harassment of Women in the Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act followed in 2013. Yet a gap and a lag still remained. On October 17, 2018, the guideline and the law achieved a long overdue relevance. And for that, all the women who spoke up and said Me Too, all those who added their support to their voices, take a bow.
This MeToo movement may not be perfect. It needs to travel to areas of darkness within the city, and outside it, to thanas, courtrooms and workplaces where women are less privileged and more vulnerable. It needs to keep itself open to the hard questions and it must remain humble and fair as it speaks truth to male entitlement and impunity. Even as it builds a wider sisterhood and solidarity, in social media and other spaces, it needs to include men as allies. For now, however, with all its imperfections, the MeToo movement looks irreversible and India can only gain from it being so. It is time now for politicians — women politicians like Sushma Swaraj, Sonia Gandhi, Vasundhara Raje, Mamata Banerjee who are still to speak up, and all the men politicians who have kept their silence — to recognise this reality. Political parties, which still have not instituted internal complaints committees on sexual harassment, must wake up to the change. Gender is no longer a peripheral, or “only” a women’s issue, easily disregarded, patronised at will. It is the insistent knock on forbidding doors, demanding a long-denied entry into spaces of the mainstream.
M J Akbar’s resignation has value, both symbolic and real. From here on, its worth will be judged in as much as it acts not as a full stop to a sordid public drama, but as the beginning of a new way of speaking, a new listening.