Dutta’s sexual harassment case back in spotlight

MUMBAI: A decade after a former Miss India walked off a set alleging sexual harassment, Bollywood is now paying attention.

Tanushree Dutta was sheltering inside her trailer on the set of a Bollywood music video. Outside, she recalled, a crowd of men were banging at the door. They demanded the actor emerge and finish her shoot. She refused.

When Dutta’s parents finally arrived and picked her up, footage from the 2008 incident shows the men surrounding the car, shattering the windshield and trapping the family inside.

Dutta, a former Miss India, had walked off the set after alleging that she was sexually harassed by Nana Patekar, a leading Bollywood actor. For a few days after the incident, her allegations were widely reported. Then the story vanished. “There was no compassion,” she said. “Nobody was really listening.”

Patekar denies the allegations. But in the past week, Dutta, 34, has become the face of a # MeToo campaign in Indian cinema that is pushing the industry closer to confronting its treatment of women.

Suddenly, A-list stars such as Priyanka Chopra are tweeting about the imperative to # Believe-Survivors. New witnesses are going public in support of Dutta’s account. The industry’s biggest male stars are being asked about the allegations at press conferences. “Neither is my name Tanushree, nor Nana Patekar, so how can I answer your questions?” was the curt reply of superstar actor Amitabh Bachchan.