Consider this one small but significant victory for India’s MeToo movement: After digging his heels in and saying he won’t step down on account of the sexual harassment allegations against him, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh has finally relinquished his position at the helm of the Wrestling Federation of India (WFI). A legislator with the ruling BJP, Singh had been the president of the WFI — and the most powerful person in Indian wrestling — for a decade. In the bluster of power, when wrestlers Vinesh Phogat and Sakshi Malik, first spoke up against him on January 18, he had issued that challenge we’ve heard so many others, similarly accused, issue before: Let them prove it, I have not done anything wrong. As pressure built and his accusers refused to back down, however, Singh was finally forced to give in and submit to what is necessary — an investigation that can only take place if he is no longer in a position to intimidate.
Would such a thing have been possible before 2018, in the pre-MeToo days? Over the last few days, a long-ago case that has come up, again and again, is the tragic case of a once-promising young athlete from Haryana named Ruchika Girhotra. In 1990, Girhotra, an up-and-coming tennis player, accused former Haryana Director General of Police S P S Rathore, who was the president of the state’s tennis association, of sexually assaulting her. Over the next two years, Rathore, arguably aided by the government of the day, made life miserable for the young girl and her family and Girhotra finally committed suicide in 1993. Rathore was finally convicted by a CBI Special Court only in 2009. The conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2016, which reduced the sentence of 18 months to the six months he had already been in custody, due to his “advanced age”. In the intervening years, not only was Rathore protected by the governments of the day, but also received promotions.
It’s not as if such a thing could never happen again, in this day and age. What has changed, however, in the post-MeToo landscape is the growing realisation that accusations such as the one Singh is facing will only get harder and harder to ignore. Perhaps the first sign was the pressure put on M J Akbar to resign from his position as Minister of State, External Affairs, after several former colleagues came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment during the 2018 MeToo wave. More recently, in March 2021, former Karnataka minister Ramesh Jarkiholi resigned from his post following allegations of sexual harassment by a woman job-seeker. The fact is that there is some progress — even if its pace is dispiriting, as demonstrated by the case of former Haryana Sports Minister Sandeep Singh who was accused of sexual harassment by a junior athletics coach, but continues to hold the Printing and Stationery portfolio.
Hope has sparked before — most memorably after the horrifying 2012 Delhi rape case which had, briefly, galvanised a nation into demanding immediate change. In the immediate aftermath, even as gender-based violence continued to be one of the brutal facts of life in India, there was a broadening of the legal definition of rape and, significantly, many more women and girls felt emboldened to report sexual assault. The MeToo wave, including the protests that stirred the Malayalam film industry following the attack on actor Bhavana in 2017, helped start the important conversation about women’s safety at the workplace. Its progress since then may be uncertain and halting, but each little victory — the resignation of Singh, the Kerala High Court telling the Malayalam film industry to implement the POSH guidelines — is heartening. The spark is not so easy to put out.
