JOURNALIST CLEARED OF DEFAMATION CHARGE REVIVES INDIA’S #METOO

BA NG A LORE, INDI A » Last month, Priya Ramani — a journalist who had accused a prominent government official and former newspaper editor of sexually harassing her during a job interview — was cleared of wrongdoing in a defamation suit he brought against her.

Since the decision, Ramani has received hundreds of messages from women thanking her for speaking up.

“I feel like it’s a beacon of hope in the middle of all this darkness,” Ramani said in an interview at her home in Bangalore. “This is like one dot on the continuum, one marker, you know, on the continuum of women fighting back against gender violence and assault in India, but it’s not going to solve everything.”

In India — where talking publicly about sex is taboo and female virtue is heavily prized — the #MeToo movement arrived late and haltingly. The floodgates opened in 2018, when Tanushree Dutta, a Bollywood star, spoke about a long-pending criminal case she had filed against a famous co-star she said had groped her on set.

The anger was not especially new — women’s rights activists have long protested persistent harassment and discrimination in India — but Dutta’s testimony encouraged dozens of women, Ramani among them, to come forward with #MeToo stories of their own.

But when the man Ramani had accused, M.J. Akbar, filed a criminal defamation lawsuit against her, it sent a stark message to others: that speaking out can be punished.

Several women who have come forward with #MeToo stories in the past have been hit with civil defamation lawsuits, but the criminal defamation suit filed by Akbar carried much steeper punishment, including the possibility of up to two years in jail. He appeared in court with 97 lawyers. Before she was sued, Ramani had never entered a courtroom.

It all started in 2018, when Ramani, swept up in a nationwide wave of truth-telling on Twitter, identified Akbar, then a minister of state in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Cabinet, as someone who had harassed her in 1993. She had described her experience in an article for Vogue India in 2017 but did not name him at the time.

“It was journalism’s worst-kept secret,” Ramani, now a columnist for Bloomberg Quint, said of Akbar. “No one in the profession was surprised at all.”

Akbar immediately denied Ramani’s allegations in a statement, rushing back to Delhi from an official work trip to Africa. He resigned from his Cabinet post. One day after that, Akbar, who remains a lawmaker in the upper house of India’s Parliament, sued Ramani for criminal defamation.