CHAPTER 22

• Jurisdiction: United States

CHAPTER 22

Traumascapes and an Arc of Resistance: #MeToo in India

Ramya Kannabiran Tella¹ and Kalpana Kannabiran²

"As Dalit women, we have for long resisted our perpetrators, which include dominant caste men, mixed caste men, men from our own castes and dominant caste women. The approaches to our battles have been varied but our language has always been one that seeks collective transformation. As anticaste feminists, we aim to dismantle caste and envision a world that strives for gender equity alongside.

To those that may reprimand us for speaking of gender justice before the battle against caste is won, we say that structural violence cannot be separated; neither for analysis nor for action. The intersectional impact of caste and gender is manifold and the appropriate response multi-pronged. Always."³

The #MeToo movement in India has sparked an important national debate that emphasizes some key dimensions with implications for international politics. These are: (1) the right to protection from sexual harassment/ violence, (2) the right to privacy, and (3) the materiality of virtual space. As a social movement, #MeToo has breached spatial, temporal, and social divisions to illustrate the extent to which digital spaces can offer normative and emotional recourse to survivors of sexual harassment, even while offline resolutions remain open. In this essay, we trace the intermeshed trajectories of these themes through conversations on social media platforms and argue that the emergent narratives of #MeToo are enriched by an intersectional approach to the study of social justice. The composition of the #MeToo movement in India is heterogeneous in terms of individuals, social location, gender identities, and experiences and is fluid—in the making, in a sense, not settled; it is a coarse and unstructured space, the undulations of which draw attention to a politics of affect that plays out on a physical-virtual continuum.

The conversations around #MeToo in India have deliberately eschewed the pathways of legal redress, even while keeping ideas of justice at the center. While a detailed analysis of the legal framework is outside the scope of this article, a brief recapitulation is provided to contextualize the movement.⁴ Until 1997, when Bhanwari Devi's case triggered the petition by feminist collectives in Rajasthan to the Supreme Court for guidelines to protect women from sexual harassment at the workplace,⁵ the only protections in place were under archaic sections of the Indian Penal Code which defined the offence of "outraging the modesty of a woman" (Sections 354 and 509). It was under these sections that the first major feminist battle against sexual harassment at the workplace was won, with the conviction and sentencing in 1996 of a much-decorated police officer KPS Gill to imprisonment for sexual harassment of a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service, Rupan Deol Bajaj.⁶ The Vishakha case followed immediately after in 1997, and the Supreme Court issued detailed guidelines that defined sexual harassment and hostile environments, bringing in international standards to set out women's rights at the workplace.

The Vishakha judgment led to a series of directives in institutes of education and government offices to set up Committees against Sexual Harassment (CASH), and prescribed complaints mechanisms and penalties. In 2013, the guidelines formed the basis for the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.⁷ The same year saw far-reaching amendments in the law on rape (shifting the definition of rape away from penile-vaginal penetration alone), drawing on the report of the Justice JS Verma Committee set up by the Union Government after the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on the streets of Delhi in December 2012. It was Justice Verma's court that set out the Vishakha guidelines in the Supreme Court in 1997 as well. There were also far reaching amendments to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act that included several forms of sexual violence against Dalit and Adivasi women in the definition of atrocity.⁸ This is the legal architecture that offers protection against sexual violence to Indian women today.

The release of the List of Sexual Harassers in Academia by Raya Sarkar, a young Dalit scholar, in 2017, marks the formal commencement of the #MeToo movement in India. The List, as it came to be known, consisted of a number of prominent names from within Indian academia, collated through anonymized sources. The debate on due process and the perils of profiling and unsubstantiated allegations through lists has created polarizations at several levels. The experience of feminist and human rights movements in India, with the creation of lists of dissenters by the state, has rendered "listing" deeply problematic. In the current debate however, the polarization in the academy is most evident in the deep shudder at the academic standing of those who had been "listed," and the refusal by primarily young university scholars to defer to "sage" rebukes. These tensions signal the changing composition of the university system in India, as well as significant shifts and the emergence of multiplicities in Indian feminist standpoints.

The second wave of the #MeToo movement in India followed the disclosures about film producer Harvey Weinstein in the United States, and has drawn a substantially greater degree of national coverage, spreading across various institutional and disciplinary confines.⁹ In the continuing context of these events, it has become important to engage in a nuanced reading of the unequal cartographies of sexual violence and affect: by speaking truth to power; by drawing attention to moments of discursive insurgency; and by re-assembling notions of civility to reflect the legitimacy of the othered voice.

Binaries as Devices of Socio-Political Articulation

The movement's entrance into the sphere of public discourse symbolized an important moment in the context of some key dualisms that reflect larger contentions and interrogations in contemporary social movements in India: (1)...