India minister in #MeToo storm resigns
NEW DELHI: India’s fledgling #MeToo movement claimed its highest-profile scalp to date yesterday as a government minister and veteran editor quit after at least 20 women accused him of sexual harassment. M J Akbar, who became junior foreign minister in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government after a glittering journalistic career, maintained however that the barrage of allegations were false. “Since I have decided to seek justice in a court of law in my personal capacity, I deem it appropriate to step down from office and challenge false accusations against me,” he said in a statement.
Allegations against Akbar snowballed last week after journalist Priya Ramani accused him of sexual harassment when the pair worked together in the 1990s. Akbar was “an expert on obscene phone calls, texts, inappropriate compliments and not taking no for an answer”, Ramani had said. She said that he would often insist on conducting interviews and meetings in hotel rooms. “As women we feel vindicated by M J Akbar’s resignation. I look forward to the day when I will also get justice in court,” she said on Twitter yesterday.
Akbar earlier dismissed Ramani’s accusations and said he would sue for defamation. But 20 other women have since offered to testify against him. Another woman said Akbar cornered and pawed her when she was a junior
reporter at the Asian Age newspaper in 1997. “He ran his hands from my breast to my hips. I tried pushing his hands away, but they were plastered on my waist,” wrote Ghazala Wahab on news website The Wire. “I ran out of his cabin and into the toilet to cry my eyes out,” added Wahab, who now works as executive editor of Force magazine.
A third accuser said Akbar had greeted her in his underwear after calling her to his hotel room and then forcibly kissed her. “Suddenly you got up, grabbed me and kissed me hard - your stale tea breath and your bristly moustache are still etched in the recesses of my memory,” journalist Tushita Patel wrote in an article for Scroll on Tuesday. She said the incident dated back to 1992 when she was a trainee.
While Modi’s Hindu nationalist government did not make a public statement, pressure was building internally for Akbar’s removal as more allegations of misconduct surfaced, sources in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party said. Akbar’s boss, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, and Women and Child Welfare Minister Maneka Gandhi both were opposed to him continuing in office while he fought a legal battle against his accusers, the sources, who cannot be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, said.
Since he got back from a tour of Africa on Sunday, Akbar had sought a meeting with Modi but that did not come through. He also asked to meet the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, a close Modi aide, but that too did not happen. Ram Das Athawale, junior minister for social justice, said he supported Akbar’s decision to quit. “The allegations against him should be properly investigated,” Athawale said.
Sandeep Shastri, a political analyst at Jain University
in the city of Bengaluru, said Akbar’s defamation lawsuit and his subsequent resignation could indicate damage limitation by the government. “You are facing an election in several states and this could have been highly embarrassing for the government. It would have been tough for the government to justify retaining him,” said Shastri. Allegations of sexual harassment have ensnared the opposition party as well. This week, the chief of the youth wing of the Congress stepped down after a female member alleged harassment, the party announced.
India’s belated #MeToo movement has made headlines in recent weeks with women sharing accounts of alleged harassment by several powerful men in the worlds of Bollywood, journalism, comedy and even cricket. The phenomenon remains confined to India’s urban elite at present, with vast numbers of women elsewhere in the country lacking either access to justice or a platform to name their tormentors. The trigger appears to have been actress Tanushree Dutta, who recently accused well-known Bollywood actor Nana Patekar of inappropriate behavior on a film set 10 years ago. Patekar has denied the claims.
Last Friday, the production of a Bollywood blockbuster was halted after the film’s lead called for the claims against Patekar, his co-star, and the feature’s director Sajid Khan to be “stringently” investigated. Three women had accused Khan of sexual harassment the day before the film was halted. One said Khan had insisted that she strip during an audition while another alleged the director had flashed his penis at her during an interview. Khan has denied the accusations.
Bollywood director Vikas Bahl has meanwhile been accused of assaulting a female employee of Phantom Films, the production house behind Netflix series “Sacred Games”, in 2015. Bahl has denied the allegations and threatened to sue his accusers for defamation. The hallowed world of Indian cricket has also not been spared, with the chief of India’s powerful cricket board, Rahul Johri, on Friday given a week to explain allegations of sexual harassment. Johri has yet to comment publicly. — Agencies