India's #MeToo movement is not a copy of the campaign that began in Hollywood with the collective outrage against Harvey Weinstein but reflects the struggles of Indian women in the past, feminist author Urvashi Butalia said here Friday.
Long before women in the American film industry called out their perpetrators, women's rights activist Ela Bhatt had exposed the plight of Indian women cart-pullers and head-loaders who were sexually harassed by men on the street in the early 1970s, Butalia said.
She was speaking at a session titled "From Existentialism to Feminism" to commemorate the 70th anniversary of French feminist-author Simone de Beauvoir's work "The Second Sex".
"Headloading women came to Bhatt and described how the street was their workplace and their home and they lived there. And they were subjected to workplace sexual harassment at the hands of the police, their male colleagues and every other man on the streets.
"And this led Ela Bhatt to focus on the rights of the women workers. To me, that is a very significant moment in the early 70s in the history of the MeToo movement today," Butalia said.
The founder of Zubaan, a feminist publishing house, also recalled the 1988 sexual harassment case filed by IAS officer Rupan Deol Bajaj against IPS officer Kanwar Pal Singh Gill for "patting" her "posterior" in an inebriated state at a party.
Gill was convicted eight years later in 1996.
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"So at this moment when so much is happening, which is helping to broaden and deepen the discussion on sexual harassment at the workplace, it is worth remembering that the history we have inherited was substantially due to the courage of these women, and it is not a copy of what happened to Harvey Weinstein," Butalia said.
Beauvoir, who wrote the book in 1949, is known as an iconic figure of contemporary feminism. She emphasised in her work "the question of women's autonomy" and the need to "broaden the horizon of the movement".
According to Butalia, the introduction of the Vishakha guidelines against sexual harassment in the workplace in 1997 following the Bhanwari Devi gang rape case marked a significant shift in the horizons of India's women's rights movement.
"When Bhanwari Devi's case came in, the horizon shifted by bringing the Vishaka guidelines into play... I take into account the new reality of more and more women entering urban workplaces as well and now in the more recent cases the horizon has once again shifted and no doubt will continue to do so," the activist-author said.
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