View Point: Be it India or Bharat, seems like no country for women

We are a little over three weeks away from Durga Puja and Navratra festivals, where the all powerful goddess Durga is worshipped across the country. However, in a most horrifying twist, the country has been rocked by several attacks on women and minor girls in these recent times. Even as the reverberations of the RG Kar Hospital rape and murder of a young doctor continue across the country, parallely a #MeToo revolution has laid bare the rot that has been there in the Malayalam cinema industry.

These incidents have put into sharp focus the issue of safety of women in the workplace – not just in hospitals and the film industry, but corporates, advertising and PR agencies, news organisations, factories, digital companies, and more. Not all attacks on women employees involve rape or murder, there is a significant percentage that has faced or is facing harassment at work – it could be sexual in nature or plain bullying and a toxic work environment.

There are several anonymous voices across different social media platforms and discussion forums, where victims or people who are aware of such instances mention about what they have gone through. And all of these instances have a common sickening thread running through them – a person, almost in all cases a male, in a position of power misbehaving with female employees. The harassments range from making someone ‘uncomfortable’ to inappropriate touch to blatantly seeking sexual favours.

A telling fact is that while these voices mention the names of the organisations in some cases, the names of the perpetrators are seldom mentioned. And even if some action is initiated against those accused, we rarely get to know of the final outcome and whether the victim/ survivor has received proper redressal.

In this View Point article, Adgully seeks to understand some ground realities of why such cases of harassment of women in the workforce happen with such impunity, are the rules in place adequate as a deterrent, what are the remedial measures, how organisations can create an environment of empowerment for their women employees.

Power game

Why do such instances happen? A simple, but harsh truth is that because the powerful perpetrators know they can get away with it. These are often men in senior positions, contributing to the organisation’s growth, taking major boardroom decisions. Thus, should some allegation be levelled against such persons, it is the victim who is asked to withdraw or toe the company line or quit.

Honestly, how many convictions do we actually know about? The year 2018 gave much hope to women that finally they could see some sort of redressal to the harassment that they had been facing. It was the year when India was rocked by the #MeToo revolution, inspired by the global #MeToo movement that shook up Hollywood and elsewhere. Women, specifically from the media and entertainment industry, took to social media to narrate their experiences and in several cases name their perpetrators.

Several well-known names were mentioned – Nana Patekar, Alok Nath, Vikas Bahl, Sajid Khan, Utsav Chakroborty, Tanmay Bhat, Anu Malik, Chetan Bhagat, and many more.

From the field of media, two powerful and senior news editors faced serious allegations – MJ Akbar and Tarun Tejpal.

We all know how these cases ended. Almost all of the perpetrators, or for the purpose of legally safe reference, ‘alleged’ perpetrators are back in business. I remember, each case drew a lot of attention at that time, they figured extensively in television debates, lengthy editorials were written, the accused faced severe trolling on social media. But did the women who came forward to name their attackers get justice? No.

Each of these men was either given the clean chit, or they offered an “unconditional apology”. Some got entangled in legal cases. Defamation cases were filed against some of the complainants.

As per media reports, around 20 women accused MJ Akbar of sexual harassment while he was a newspaper editor. Akbar later turned to politics, becoming minister of state for external affairs. Journalist Priya Ramani was the first person to accuse Akbar in an article she wrote for Vogue magazine without mentioning his name. While Akbar resigned as minister, he denied all allegations and even filed a criminal defamation case against Ramani, who was acquitted in the case by a Delhi court. Akbar then filed a petition against Ramani’s acquittal in the criminal defamation case. As of January 2022, the Delhi High Court admitted Akbar’s appeal.

Click here to read the account of Pallavi Gogoi, who claimed to have been raped by Akbar.

In 2013, Tarun Tejpal was accused of sexual assault by a junior female colleague at a luxury hotel in Goa. At that time, Tejpal was editor-in-chief of Tehekla magazine. He was arrested by the Goa Police in the case and his trial began at the District and Sessions Court at Mapusa in North Goa. In May 2021, the sessions court acquitted Tejpal of all charges in the sexual assault and rape case of the junior female colleague. In the same month, the Goa government moved the Bombay High Court challenging Tejpal’s acquittal.

However, it was the sessions court’s judgement while acquitting Tejpal that came in for sharp criticism for being heavily biased against the victim, whose character was attacked, highlighting her sexual history and personal life to determine the issue of consent. In this, the court expressed a stereotype opinion of women.

Why am I delving into this in detail? To highlight why getting justice is a long, traumatic and often lonely process. Character assassination of the victim has not stopped. Moreover, there is often very little in terms of what the victim can present as the all important evidence. On top of this, the powerful perpetrators can always slap a defamation case against the victim. Thus, we have so many women either backing off or preferring to remain silent.

The ground realities of Indian workplaces

The horrific RG Kar Hospital rape and murder case has shown how vulnerable women are in the workplace. The young doctor was attacked and killed during her night shift at the hospital. There are of course different conspiracy theories floating around – that she was silenced for knowing too much about some illegal practices going on in the hospital, that it was a case of gang-rape. However, the CBI has refuted that.

It’s not just in the healthcare sector, but media, advertising, public relations, entertainment, IT sector, too, sees both men and women putting in long hours, often working overnight. Several women working across sectors whom I spoke to in informal chats have admitted to facing some form of harassment – male colleagues sharing vulgar jokes, or showing risqué content or standing too close for comfort, or forcing them to have alcoholic drinks at gettogethers, or insisting on dropping them home when other modes of transport are available, or touching them inappropriately, or even blatantly seeking favours.

While some of these women did complain to their seniors in their organisations about the harassment, but the most that they saw was the accused being given a warning. But they had to continue working together in the same office. On the worst side, some of the women complainants were asked to either “cooperate” or quit.

In August this year, Network of Women in India (NWMI) came out with guidelines for safe newsrooms. NWMI pointed out that sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination and misogyny plagued many newsrooms across the country. It also mentioned other forms of harassment such as, yelling, insulting, shifting of work-related goalposts to create a constant sense of anxiety among staff, unhealthy levels of competition, unreasonable work hours and non-existent or dysfunctional grievance redressal mechanisms.

But it’s not just the office space, even commuting to and from office sometimes became a harrowing experience, especially if there was no office transport available. Even cab services like Ola and Uber were not safe, as a young journalist shared a scary experience where the driver refused to take her all the way to her destination and spoke to her in a threatening tone. She had to pay the full fare and she had to almost jump out of the moving cab. Many journalists travel late at night after some industry event or even regular work, and everyone I spoke to confessed that they felt scared.

Interestingly, a lot of working women in Delhi carried some kind of weapon on them – a pen knife, or a blade, or a pepper spray. However, no one had the women’s distress number – 181 – on speed dial.

One would recall the murder of journalist Soumya Vishwanathan, who used to work with Headlines Today in Delhi. She was shot dead by four men whom she overtook while driving her car back to her home in the wee hours of the morning on September 8, 2008. It took 15 years for the court to convict her killers. Her killers would have gone scot free had it not been for the persistence of the parents of another young woman, Jigisha Ghosh. Jigisha, who used to work with Hewitt Associates in Noida, was forcibly taken by four men in a car in the wee hours of March 18, 2009, from outside her residence. The purpose was robbery. The men forced her to share the pin for her ATM card following which they killed her and dumped her body in Faridabad. Jigisha’s parents followed the money trail as the men who killed her shopped using her ATM card. Once caught, the men confessed to have killed Soumya a few months earlier.

Vishakha, POSH, She-Box

It’s not that there are no rules in place to check sexual harassment of women in any form in the work place. The infamous Bhanwari Devi gang-rape case led to the Supreme Court setting out the “Vishaka Guidelines”, that directed organisations to ensure protection of the female employees from sexual harassment at the workplace, besides taking measures to resolve or prosecute such cases.

The Government of India enacted the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 (POSH) with the objective to create a safe and secure workplace for women free from sexual harassment. This Act caters to women working both in organised and unorganised sector and establishes a redressal mechanism for the disposal of their complaints.

Last week, the Ministry of Women and Child Development launched the Sexual Harassment electronic Box (SHe-Box), an online complaint management system aimed at providing a single window access to every woman, irrespective of her work status, whether working in organised or unorganised, private or public sector, to facilitate the registration of complaint related to sexual harassment. Any woman facing sexual harassment at workplace can register their complaint through this portal. Once a complaint is submitted to the ‘SHe-Box’, it will be directly sent to the concerned authority having jurisdiction to take action into the matter.

Wide gap between formation and implementation

With such extensive measures in place – legally as well as the guidelines formulated by some industry bodies – one would have thought that ensuring safety of women in the workplace would be achieved. However, the whole exercised is marred by poor enforcement of the sexual harassment laws in India.

Both POSH Act and NWMI guidelines have directed setting up of legally mandated Internal Complaints Committees to deal with sexual harassment, with representation from across departments as well as an impartial external member without personal or professional connections to the organisation or its management (as required by the law). However, industry reports state that organisations often lag behind in setting up Internal Complaints Committees until a sexual harassment complaint is filed. Till the time such committees become fully functional in orgnisations there will be no proper redressal of grievances.

The other recourse is fighting it out in a court of law, which is easier said than done. Even in the Nirbhaya case, a high profile case which went to fast track court, it took almost seven and half years for justice to be delivered. How many women can sustain this long, traumatic, costly and lonely fight for justice, especially where there is no adequate evidence or lack of witness and the perpetrator has powerful connections? What will you do if after filing a case against the accused, the court grants him anticipatory bail stating “in case of his arrest his reputation as well as the service career shall be jeopardised”? It has happened recently in the case where a senior Indian Air Force officer has been charged with rape.

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