India orders movie moguls to avoid the Weinstein effect

MUMBAI, Dec 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - India has issued a rare diktat to its powerful movie moguls, reminding Bollywood to keep women safe from the sort of sex abuse allegations poisoning the U.S. film industry.

India’s minister for women and child welfare Maneka Gandhi wrote to major production houses on Wednesday, asking them to comply with the Sexual Harassment at Workplace Act, which stipulates a series of processes to protect women at work.

“Bollywood filmmakers are ethically and legally accountable for the safety of not only their direct employees but of all outsourced and temporary staff as well,” read a tweet posted by Gandhi’s ministry, quoting from her letter.

Indian firms with 10 or more employees must set up committees to look into complaints of sexual harassment and ensure that female staff know their workplace rights.

Despite such laws, activists say very few of cases of sexual harassment are reported to the police in an industry, like Hollywood, that is run by men and operates by its own rules.

The same whisper networks that trafficked warnings about Weinstein in the US also exist in India. Off-the-record, Bhasker reeled off a dozen household names in Bollywood who are regarded as “serial harassers”.

They are unlikely to be unmasked any time soon, she says. Bollywood and other Indian film industries have no appetite for controversy. “This is a not an industry that has typically stood for causes,” Bhasker says.

She raises the recent furore around Padmavati, a film about a legendary Hindu queen whose release was indefinitely postponed after protests and death threats against the cast. “Producers don’t go to court. They don’t fight. It is a non-confrontational industry.

“Why, in a context like this, would people with tens of millions of rupees to lose align themselves with some powerless struggling girl? They’ll say, sorry babe – just go home. It is not a context that breeds solidarity.”Actors who call out their harassers must also contend with a culture that still shames victims, and which eyes female stars with awe and reverence, but suspicion too.

“It is an industry where actors have to wear any kind of dress or do intimate scenes,” Padmapriya says. “And people assume, if you’re up for doing that, then what’s the big deal?”

Courtesy The Guardian, UK