#Me Too Maelstrom Mauls Many

Five years ago, when Tarun Tejpal, the editor of Tehelka magazine, was caught pants down for his testosterone fuelled antics with a young colleague and later faced the full glare of social media, I had thought that lucky were those editors and journalists who had carried out similar acts in the pre-internet and typewriter days.

Names of M.J. Akbar and some others (still not outed yet), who were part of press club folklore, came to my mind. During my student days in the late 80s and early 90s Akbar was a big name in journalism and his column ‘Byline' was something we all looked forward to in the now defunct Sunday magazine of Anand Bazar Patrika stable. I also happened to read his book Riot After Riot and a biography on Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru: The Making of India). All this gave me an impression of him being a man of great erudition.

But later in a baffling fashion he chose politics and my respect for him went down a few notches, as I thought it was a great loss for journalism. However during my rookie sub-editor days in Mumbai I got to know that the prodigal was returning to journalism and starting a new paper Asian Age.

When the recruitment happened, the grapevine had it that only 'fast' girls were getting recruited and all key position were occupied by women with very little experience. My respect for him dived many more notches. However, still the general perception was that although he was a 'ladies’ man' he was 'good at his job'.

That was also the time India embraced economic liberalisation and newsrooms also witnessed drastic changes. The editor's age profile became much younger and there were more women joining the profession. The look and feel of newspapers also changed, thanks to better printing technology and headlines became catchier than matter of fact.

The presence of higher number of women and younger workforce was a mixed bag. On one hand it brought about greater gender sensitization (use of misogynist Hindi expletives came down) and the blooming of office romances. But some of the superiors, deeply entrenched in patriarchy, took advantage of the power they enjoyed to treat their junior women colleagues as a fair game. They used this by dangling carrots like dinner invites, junkets and out of turn promotions. Those days sexual harassment redress mechanisms were not even thought of.

Newspaper offices then were closed places and nothing spilled over to the public domain. A Tejpal type incident those days would have been swept under the carpet or settled with mere apology or a transfer.

Managements used to close ranks and observe an incestuous 'code of silence' so that the publications name is not sullied. Even rival newspapers too adhered to this code, keeping in mind the glass houses they all were in. In those pre-cellphone/internet days even gossips never used to travel beyond the confines of office canteens or press clubs.

Internet and social media changed the rules of the game as it now 'follows' us everywhere and now it has also proved that in addition to making contemporary events go 'viral', it can even exhume issues that happened two decades ago to haunt the perpetrators by 'calling out'.

In India #me too fire got noticed nearly an year after US. It has simmered for long and took its own sweet time to become vigorous enough to singe people's reputations. But once actor Tanushree Dutta lit the fire, it has been relentless like the French guillotine and many reputations fell by the wayside.

While some were quite obvious as they wore their playboy selves on their sleeves, but names like Vinod Dua, Jatin Das and others evoked shock and disbelief, as they were considered quite progressive and respectable.

It first started with the film industry and later spread to the English journalism, thanks to a journalist named Sandhya Menon. The first to get caught in its cross hairs was K.R. Sreenivas, the resident editor of a prominent daily, to be followed by some Kolkata and Delhi based journalists.

While their ex-colleagues were coming out with unsavoury details about their peccadilloes, I again wondered whether this #me too will address the elephant in the room or be rest content with having a tilt at bit players.

Finally, the much anticipated happened. Akbar got outed and as expected it opened a Pandora's box. And I must admit that despite being aware of his Casanova ways, the Tweets left me shell shocked. They were far more toxic than the above-mentioned press club gossip, which at the most made him appear as a flamboyant editor with a glad eye for women. 

As per the disclosures, he was a sexual predator on the loose, with no one to question or curb him and he got away with all this for decades. Journalist Saba Naqvi recalling her stint in the Telegraph and without naming Akbar summed him up very well, “He behaved like a village Thakur who set off to claim any young thing that caught his fancy."

Amid all this hoopla there are allegations of witch hunt and not adhering to the due process. While the former cannot be ruled out as a few innocent men may get pilloried for no fault of theirs, the latter point does not hold much water. 

In many disclosures the victims had stated that they had approached sexual harassment redress committees, but no action was taken. At the most the erring employees were transferred, which is just a change of scene for them. The infamous ordeal of Rina Mukherjee a journalist with The Statesman is a case in point. She was terminated for filing a sexual harassment complaint against her news coordinator and had to fight a long drawn legal battle spanning more than a decade.

It is a well known fact that at many media establishments sexual harassment redress committees are mere sinecures of little consequence. So far no media company has taken any drastic action like say Infosys took against Phaneesh Murthy in 2002, when he got embroiled in a sexual harassment case. 

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In Praise of Macaulay

English language is a favourite punching bag for the country's political class, as it pays them rich electoral dividends. While those in the cow belt dub it as a vestige of our colonial past, often to mask their obscurantist agendas and insecurities, those in the south of Vindhyas and eastern India see it as an impediment or even a threat to their native tongues.

But at the same time they ensure that their immediate kith and kin study in the best English medium schools and later acquire foreign degrees.

The latest to fire a salvo against English was Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu, who termed the English language a ‘disease’ left behind by the British and stressing that Hindi was the symbol of “socio-political and linguistic unity”. The occasion happened to be 'Hindi Divas'.

He lamented that the Constituent Assembly (which framed the Constitution) had accepted Hindi as one of the official languages of the country, but its wishes have not been fulfilled. Interestingly, the same assembly had also adopted English as an official language at the same meeting.

Later at another meeting he clarified that “English mind” is an illness, and not the language, and stated the country should be proud of its rich heritage.

For the political class irrespective of the party or the ideology they profess, English is a red rag that charges them up. They see Thomas Babington Macaulay, the man who played a major role in bringing in English education to India, as an evil incarnate.

Though Macaulay had a very narrow utilitarian intent to promote the language among the elite Indians to build an English knowing clerical class, the fallout it created was something nobody had foreseen.

It did develop an elite class in all parts of the country, especially urban centres, but in the linguistically diverse India, English soon emerged as a link language and also a means to acquire global knowledge in science, mathematics, law and all forms of modern scholarship.

Though we may not like to admit it but the seeds of nationalism, social reform and even freedom struggle were also unwittingly laid because of English language.

The formation of Indian National Congress in 1885, in which Scotsman ornithologist turned civil servant Allan Octavian Hume played a major part, became a platform of the political fight towards India's freedom.

In the early days Congress party was a gaggle of lawyers drawn from the length and breadth of the country and they all conversed and even made speeches in English.

This is how an Ismaili Koja Muslim lawyer Mohammed Ali Jinnah became friends with Maharashtrian Brahmin Gopal Krishna Gokhale; a Gujarati Baniya lawyer Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi got acquainted and later became related to Tamil Brahmin lawyer S Rajagopalachari.

It is the same English education that helped Dr B.R. Ambedkar fight the deeply entrenched casteist oppression prevalent during his period and become one of the most influential and inspiring figures in general and for the underprivileged classes in particular. That is how the idea of India took shape. All this is part of our history and cannot be wished away.

And now cut to the last decade of twentieth century. While US technology giants were scouting for locations to outsource their work, what worked in India's favour? It was again the knowledge of English language, though the constant attacks on the language had taken its toll in terms of standards.

Cheap and well trained manpower was also available in China and many other countries, and they had far superior infrastructure, but it is the much maligned English education that swung deals in India's favour.

US company officials were ready to overlook potholed roads and crumbling infrastructure to set up base in India. Now the Chinese are burning midnight oil to master English language and wrest the lone unique selling proposition (USP) India enjoys, and our above-mentioned political class is working overtime to hasten that process.

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