Elaborate the ‘Me Too’ Movement and its impact in India. (2018)
Me Too is a movement of public testimony against sexual harassment, coined by the American activist Tarana Burke in 2006 and globalised as a hashtag in October 2017. Sociologically it is what Manuel Castells calls a networked social movement, formed through mass self-communication outside parties and formal organisations, and a new social movement whose stake is dignity and cultural meaning rather than distribution.
The Indian sequence
- October 2017: a crowdsourced list of alleged harassers in universities, compiled by the law student Raya Sarkar, split Indian feminism. A statement signed by established feminists, among them Nivedita Menon, asked for due process; Dalit and younger activists replied that due process had protected savarna men for decades.
- September–October 2018: an allegation by the actor Tanushree Dutta opened a wave of testimony across film, journalism, advertising, comedy and law. A Union minister resigned in October 2018 after allegations by several women journalists.
- February 2021: a Delhi court acquitted the journalist Priya Ramani in the criminal defamation case brought against her, holding that the right to reputation cannot be protected at the cost of a woman’s right to life and dignity, and that a woman may voice her grievance decades later. This is the movement’s single most consequential legal outcome.
Impact
- Institutional: it activated the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 — itself the codification of the Vishaka guidelines (1997) won after the assault on the Rajasthan saathin Bhanwari Devi. Internal Committees that existed on paper began functioning; media houses, studios and firms adopted policies.
- Epistemic: it shifted the burden of shame from complainant to accused and established testimony as evidence in the public sphere — the recognition claim Nancy Fraser distinguishes from redistribution.
- Continuity: Radha Kumar (The History of Doing, 1993) shows Indian feminism advancing through such flashpoints — Mathura (1979), Bhanwari Devi, and the 2012 Delhi gang rape.
Limits
- Its participants were largely urban, English-speaking, professional and upper-caste. Sharmila Rege‘s Dalit feminist standpoint and Uma Chakravarti‘s brahmanical patriarchy explain why the Dalit or Adivasi agricultural worker, for whom caste and sexual violence are fused, was absent.
- Over nine-tenths of Indian women work in the informal sector, where the Act’s Local Committees are barely constituted; a smartphone was the price of entry.
- Naming without procedure invited defamation suits, and the wave subsided without organisational residue.
Conclusion
Me Too changed the sayable more than the structural. Its durable gain is that workplace sexual harassment is now a recognised institutional risk rather than a private misfortune; its unfinished task is to reach the women who cannot tweet.