An avalanche of shame: How social media went from becoming a site of abuse of women to a platform where women outed their abusers

How it all began

I remember about a decade ago I had chanced upon Orkut, which now seems Facebook’s pre-historic ancestor. I started basking in the azure Orkut skies with considerable glee because it was a chance to reconnect with friends I had lost to their IT jobs and their consequent dread of sending emails after doing it at work all day, even if to a long lost friend. A few days into the e-socialising I was warned by well wishers against putting up my photographs online. They had chosen to replace their own display pictures with white cherubs, celebs and tulips. Their unsolicited, solicitous advice came from what they had heard about the misuse of data and pictures online, especially when it came to women. Their was talk of morphed pictures, theft and blackmail in the cyberspace.

What they feared was not baseless but I still chose to live my life, online and otherwise, on my terms, rather than let unknown villainous forces determine my choices. I took the stand to fight those who stole and misused others’ data. It was the same as believing in asserting my claim over the physical public space and going out prepared to confront those who challenged this right of mine, instead of giving in to them and shrinking my world to my home.

I got a chance to put theory into practice soon enough when, not through Orkut but through Yahoo messenger, an anonymous blackmailer sent me messages threatening to tell my family I was dating someone. I was young and taken aback for a moment but was immediately seeing red hot rage in the presumptuous texts. I was outraged to think that a stranger could make so bold as to believe that he would have so much power over me because as a woman I was flouting a societal norm by dating. I had no intention of handing over my self-respect to him. I refused him what he was looking for – attention – and did not respond to the message. If my family received some malicious letter some day from a stranger, they certainly did not apprise me of it.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life/The world would split open”

Cut to the present day, many years later, and I find that the above lines from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem resonate with our reality. Looking at the #metoo movement in India, we would find many women outing their sexual abusers online, through Twitter but also through Facebook and Instagram. It is also a slap in the face of that annoying expression about women being women’s enemies. Women at the front of the movement have formed a protective wall around those who could bring themselves to share their horror stories only because they were promised anonymity in the online public space. This has been one of the most heartening examples of the women’s solidarity network that always existed but was not adequately acknowledged in the misogynist discourse. Women are trying to ensure that survivors, many having to relive their trauma in the retelling, get what they need: therapy, legal help, a patient ear. This one hashtag on social media has brought women together across the globe.

It is not that social media has ceased to be the abusive arena it has been for women, same as any other public space in which women first make their foray. Sudipti, who writes regularly for Hindi publications online and in print, and is a schoolteacher, says, “As a woman as long as you are writing on gender and other social issues, you may still be fine. Expand further into religion and politics and be prepared to witness the backlash. After writing continuously on these issues, I got exhausted handling the constant whataboutery and prejudice, and stopped.”

But digital footprints are easier to track than physical ones and women have also given back as good as they got by taking action against abuse through solid proofs like emails and screenshots, which the social media makes easier to save and reproduce. Having practised theatre in Paris, Delhi and Dharamshala, Niranjani Iyer was one of those who make their Facebook profiles due to exhortations by friends and then their digital presence gets relegated to the background. In the context of women speaking out online, she exclaims: “I never thought I would say this but I am so glad that social media exists. I would still say Twitter can be noisy but with Instagaram you can reach so many.” Theatre needs its practitioners to take on different roles and personas, and those in power take advantage of these grey areas to abuse their colleagues. “This movement has not exploded in theatre yet. But it has made people rethink power equations. The kind of things people in power have got away with . . . the impunity . . . I don’t think it’s possible now. The potential for women to come out with their stories is huge.” She talks of the notion of shame imposed on women, which led to guilt in women about what had been done to them. “Now women are speaking up and saying, ‘You did this’.”

In journalism, theatre, writing, music, films, different kinds of art spaces, in some ways it can become easier to gaslight victims because the abusers often have politically correct, progressive, masks. The wordplay they employ to defend themselves can also be that much more brazen and preposterous. Take the case of accused poet CP Surendran trying to defend himself in his statement (Firstpost, 16 October 2018): “I believe sexism is an intellectual and physical reality . . . I choose not to think in given categories.”

Social media has enabled abusers as well, by giving men an easy space for their sanctimonious declamations that contradict their acts of violations, so that victims in the beginning end up questioning themselves and potential supporters of survivors are full of doubts. On the basis of an image formation that they achieve on this fluid medium, announcing book deals and getting themselves photographed with well known faces seen in the mainstream media, their stream of “friends” and “followers” who believe in that image also grows.

When such a personality, a well known poet, was called out on Facebook by another poet, the survivor was met with both support and disbelief. Poet and scholar Semeen Ali was one of those to come out in the survivor’s support and, with other poets, sent a letter to Sahitya Akademi. The letter demanded that the accused step down from the editorship of a prestigious anthology in the making, which many of the signatory poets had been selected to be part of.

Semeen recalls the series of events to have unfolded after that: “There were people who signed the letter and backed out. They did not want to ruin their equation with him [the accused]. The Indian poetry scene is really small and many do not speak up as they are afraid they won’t be published in anthologies.” Of these, many were later invited to readings organised by the accused, while some places that used to earlier invite Semeen’s poetry distanced themselves from her. Semeen is also a book reviewer and, after this incident, refused to review books written by the accused, knowing that possible consequences could include her being “blacklisted” as a reviewer as well by some renowned publications. “And that’s ok”, she says, “I could not keep silent knowing what had happened, also considering my personal experience and those of other poets as well when it came to the behaviour of the accused on several occasions.”

The loss of conditional friendships and spaces for career advancement have not deterred other women. Like Niranjani, who started her own theatre company and did physical theatre in India at a time of dialogue based plays, believes, “What are spaces, after all? Spaces can be created.” In cases where an accused has been first named on social media, many other women have come out with their stories of him. Others came out to support the survivor and her case. There have also been women who started putting out their stories anonymously, sharing their identity details only to one or more of the women who were ready to listen and to share these stories further with permission. Some of these anonymous tellers later revealed their identities, which gave their narratives even greater credibility but also added to their vulnerability.

Their life on social media was scrutinised by naysayers. Women with a “low” follower count online were accused of sharing their stories of abuse to gain more followers; they were asked again and again to repeat lurid details of the harassment, blamed for “harming” the reputation and career of the men who had ruined the women’s reputation and career, and left them with enduring trauma. Actor Tanushree Datta’s account of harassment by co-actor Nana Patekar when she refused to enact certain scenes for a film was mocked by trolls who circulated video clips showing her kissing on screen in other films.

It was the usual scene of trolling and abuse that women face when they speak up. Only this time they were not alone. They were standing up for each other; they were educating, agitating, organising, through letters demanding investigations to organisations the accused were a part of, to the police, the court and the National Commission for Women. The Network for Women in Media in India kept taking regular cognisance of these accounts and pushed for action, along with providing support to survivors.

An online movement? Really?

Online movements were scoffed at in the beginning as the best one could expect of lazy millennials. However, with time it became clear that not all online campaigns lack teeth. From protests in Iran and Egypt to #Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, all over the world people have successfully used social media to amplify their causes.

Concerns have been expressed about whether the Indian #metoo movement with a large online base can be truly inclusive, whether it can reach those much lower in the rung when it comes to caste, class and patriarchal oppression, many of whom have no access to digital spaces. It would be naive to believe that the number of social media users in India represent the whole country, or a balanced gender ratio among its users. Think tank LIRNEAsia’s study, reported by Karishma Mehrotra for The Indian Express on 8 August 2018, showed that 80 percent of Indian men are mobile users, and only 43 percent women have cellphones. The gender gap in users is higher in rural areas, 52 percent, and was recorded as 34 percent in urban India. 64 percent, of which 68 percent were women, did not know about the Internet. 27 percent of those who did know mostly used it for social media.

But there is clearly potential for more in a scenario where a person in a village recharge their phone with Rs 10 to watch an entire movie. India has the highest annual growth rate of Internet users. If mobiles and the world wide web did not offer spaces of expansion to women, khap panchayats and town councils would not have advised women against those things.

Rural women reporters of Khabar Lahariya joined the #metoo women to talk of the daily harassment done by their male counterparts, and shared how men had stopped sending them porn in the wake of the movement. Garment workers, bus conductors and street vendors in Karnataka met publicly and spoke about the harassment they are forced to face at their workplaces every day if they want to hold on to their jobs. These examples are not enough.

But it is also important to remember that women from non-urban spaces have not spoken up for the first time. In fact it was Bhanwari Devi, a rural, Dalit woman, whose fight against the sexual violence done to her led to the Vishakha Guidelines and a law against sexual harassment at workplace. So the notion that only urban women can “take” the movement to the unorganised and rural sectors is also flawed, though urban, digitally educated women can certainly work to spread it. Raya Sarkar, a bahujan feminist who started the movement online in 2017 says in a Livemint interview to Rituparna Chatterjee (who has been one of those at the forefront of the 2018 campaign), published on 15 October 2018, “A lot more can be done because dalit, adivasi and bahujan women’s voices are missing from the discourse right now . . . It should include the voices of trans women, homosexual men and women and non-binary folks.” But what the movement has done despite its limitations is to remind women themselves of the power of solidarity, of the responsibility each woman has of keeping it open and inclusive, working together to reclaim the online space as well as the public domain and ensuring more women have safe access to these spaces.

Where do women stand as social media users?

Women on social media were first targeted by companies as mere consumers. The Internet is rife with video advertisements celebrating gender equality, though on television this is still making slow progress. But as women started being attacked for being political and not just personal beings online, they demanded better regulations from platforms and a zero-tolerance approach to threats and hate speech. The end result is far from being achieved in entirety but the pressure forced platforms like Twitter and Facebook to take into account online sexual harassment done through their platforms. These groups have since come up with tools to provide a safer environment for women online and collaborated with women’s rights groups to work better in this direction. At the same time, there is sometimes great disparity in how these platforms take action: a person’s account gets suspended for their political opinions while another openly abusive person continues to retain their account. These practices would need to be remedied even if companies have no interests other than business ones are heart, and it might encourage more women, therefore more “consumers”, to start using these platforms.

There are groups studying the intersection of gender and technology, fighting for a safer and more equal space for women online, organising trainings for women on digital security and on dealing with trolling and cybercrimes. Tactical Tech Collective’s XYZ platform, Internet Democracy Project, Feminism in India, Access Now, Digital Empowerment Foundation are some of the various groups involved in doing and supporting similar work.

One way social media has offered a safe haven to women is by connecting them to support groups that they do not always find in their physical lives: there exist groups for domestic violence survivors to single mother groups. These are safe spaces for the women to share their experiences, seek out advice and be connected to experts, legal and health professionals as required.

“The meek shall inherit the earth”

What happens on social media does not necessarily remain on social media. The multiple accusations against ex-Union minister MJ Akbar have now turned into a defamation suit against one of the accusers, journalist Priya Ramani. When this made news, women on social media started pledging all sorts of support to Ramani. There were several who wanted to help with the legal expenses; others kept reassuring that all of them would back Ramani’s fight in whatever way possible. Most of these people were unknown to the journalist herself. Amidst everyday articles about social media leading to loneliness, there were hordes of women assuring each other of solidarity and support.

I was recently sitting in a room with other writers and poets, all men, when a poet was asked to recite something in particular. The poet refused, looked at me and said he would rather avoid it in this /#metoo phase. I quietly corrected him to say that it is not a phase, it is here to stay.

Twenty-years after her demonisation, in the US Monica Lewinsky is finally appearing in a docuseries (made by a team with women in majority) on The Clinton Affair. In a piece by her in Vanity Fair titled “Who Gets to Live in Victimville?” (13 November 2018), Lewinsky writes, “Bye-bye, Lewinsky scandal . . . I think 20 years is enough time to carry that mantle.” She remembers that when Clinton got quizzed about why he had had this inappropriate relationship, his answer was “Because I could”. Responding to questions about why Lewinsky would go through the trauma of participating in the series that demanded digging up of painful memories and unsavoury news articles, she states she participated because “I [she] could”, to ensure that what happened to her “never happens to another young person in our [her] country again”.

Herein also lies the reason why it has not been easy to dismiss the Indian #metoo movement as a social media “fad” or “trend”, though many used these frivolous terms to denigrate the movement. It is because women are speaking up not just for themselves but for those who fought before them and for the ones to come after. Statement after statement by survivors echoes this thought . . . that they are doing this for others who suffered and took the risk of speaking up, or so their sisters and daughters and any other woman does not end up believing that silence is their only recourse. These are women who have often and repeatedly been failed by due processes instituted by official committees and laws. In fact, their voicing themselves on social media has exposed the inefficacy of many of these systems and organisations and also shown that power does not lie in the hands of a few people at the heads of committees and institutions. Women have used social media to create spaces and platforms that had been consistently and unapologetically denied to them, and those who robbed women of these rights would now have to contend with their complicity. Those who have been holding their breath for the movement to “fizzle out” should instead take a deep breath and prepare for the long haul. The day of reckoning that they thought would never come is finally here.

First published in The Equator Line, Jan-Mar 2019.

V for Vendetta: A film I do not tire of watching

As Guy Fawkes Night has been observed for Centuries because it is imbued with a timeless symbolism, so are certain films which become a part of you — and increasingly relevant — over time.

Like most films, V for Vendetta too is not able to perform highly enough to meet the expectations of its illustrious parent, the book with the same title by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. The occasional attempts to insert mush do not go well with the overall flavour of the story.

Having disclaimed that, it is safe to say that the 2005 movie made by James McTeigue and written by The Wachowskis holds a claim to distinctiveness. It is special enough to make me and my partner watch it when we wish to compensate for being away from our families on festivals.

The film doesn’t fail expectations at all. It is a high tension electric wire running through the audience’s minds and hearts as the anarchist revolutionary V, played by Hugo Weaving, orchestrates a series of events to expose the government, very much in the vein of the Paris revolution’s “No replastering, the structure is rotten.” It is art done elegantly, when a dystopian theme like this could have resulted in a lot of confusion and muck flying around. Its finesse does not gesticulate towards its beauty but rests in its place after it has been created, to be appreciated by those who will.

I believe it settled in some part of me because after I saw it, one of my delirious dreams, conceived during some sickness, was this:

A feminist revolution has achieved the complete eradication of sexism. I know the overthrow has been successful because some of the revolution graffiti is also sent to my new phone as a text message. The first line reads: “It may seem to you an occasion of bereavement but you’ll soon discover that it is one of joy.” I read the message and am immediately reassured that the efforts made by me and my compatriots to bring in equality of all genders have not been in vain.

It awakens unstirred parts of you: vestigial parts that haven’t been used in a while so you can’t immediately locate the vibrations. So you don’t want to talk about the movie after it’s over but close your eyes and wrap yourself around you and listen to those stirrings and eventually act upon them, when you are hit hard by the truth of these words uttered by Valerie, a character V fondly recalls in the film: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch, we are free.” I know I want to live each day, no matter what the span of my life, when Valerie’s voice in the film gives credence to her persona in the book: “ . . . for three years, I had roses, and apologized to noone.”

Without pouncing upon you with some cliched declamation, it touches you in places you had not thought of for some time. You see it as a long-forgotten friend but don’t know how your present world will absorb it and so you quietly pull it into a corner and keep it hidden, to visit when no one is around. You know that it is not vendetta that V needs; he needs love and out of that love for him you want him to have his vendetta for isn’t he wonderful and shouldn’t he have everything he desires?

And of course, most of all, the film is about the fearlessness everyone wants, fear being the only real obstacle to living. I had been hugely impressed with the part where Natalie Portman is angry with V for making her go through torture, until he makes her realise that it had been to rid her of her fears. There is solace in the routine of torture because you seem to know more or less when it will be, even if it is every day, and can actually prepare yourself for it, and then be tortured and have even more time to prepare for the next day. This is not in the nature of a calamity, which catches you unawares and demands immediate attention. Isn’t it true that the only way to defeat our fears are to go ahead and meet them, to look them in the eye, rather than to keep looking over our backs all life?

A lot of fans have tried to guess at who the character of V “really” is, to speculate on his relations with other characters. I do not want to do that, to indulge in the “paradox of asking a masked man who he is”. Because I think what the film, and V, wanted us to know and believe was that V is all of us, and that we have it in us to be V if we can go through a fire and come out burnt but not broken.

First published in  thREAD, The Hindu, 8 Nov 2018.

Sevagram: A reminder of Gandhi’s forgotten ideals

Despite all my issues with parts of Gandhi’s politics . . . despite being aware that it is not in vogue today to admire something related to him, today when invariably I notice that bookstands have put My Experiments with Truth on the back shelves to make way for Godse's Why I Killed Gandhi, I am sharing my memories of Sevagram that have stayed with me over the years, whose temporary peace I have sought in many places since. I believe trouble occurs when we make heroes out of people whose work we admire. We start worshipping them, and the minute they make a mistake they fall from our grace. It is so much simpler to put our faith in the word done and in the ideals followed, for their significance goes much beyond the people who espoused them. If a leader, for example, fights against corruption, and is then caught in a corrupt act himself, it is not as if the idea of fighting against corruption is to be let go of (unless we are looking for an excuse to be corrupt ourselves).

A visit to Sevagram (Wardha, Maharashtra), where Gandhi moved in 1936, is like coming back to the very best of what the people’s leader had come to represent. Being in Sevagram was a complete antidote to how I felt living in Delhi: the capital city that triggered feelings of stress, anxiety and inadequacy. Sevagram, on the contrary, calmly signifies that less is more and reminds one of the power of determined marches over frantic runs. Originally a village brought to prominence due to Gandhi’s stay there, Sevagram is still making up its mind about whether to behave as a town or a village. Luckily for tourists, this perplexity offers them the best of both worlds. It has the quiet of a village and yet manages to provide the amenities of a town, from varying modes of conveyance to cyber cafes. As I disembarked at the Sevagram railway station and stopped at a bookshop to buy some (now rarely found) books in Hindi, the bookseller shared his guilt about not having visited Gandhi’s ashram and made me promise that I would not follow him in his sin.

It is true that the most rewarding treat of staying at Sevagram is a visit to Bapu Kuti. One does not have to be a Gandhi devotee to be able to appreciate the austere beauty of the ashram’s premises. Gandhi is said to have shared these thoughts about who should consider residing in the ashram: “He alone deserves to be called an inmate of the Ashram who has ceased to have any worldly relation - a relation involving monetary interests-- with his parents or other relatives, who has no other needs save those of food and clothing and who is ever watchful in the observance of the eleven cardinal vows. Therefore he who needs to make savings, should never be regarded as an Ashram inmate.”

The hut which welcomed Gandhi and his many visitors is nothing short of a museum. A quaint bath, an elderly, dignified telephone box and neat little alcoves shyly peeping from the walls, all serve to create an inexplicable nostalgia for a past that we were not even a part of. The kitchen contains the flour grinder Gandhi put to use occasionally. His cot and massage table have also been retained. The sacredness of the place is defended by the several sombre trees that have themselves withstood the many ravages of time. The practice of daily prayers in the open continues till date. The campus has all the humility carried in the name of the village ('a village for service').

In fact, the last bit is true of all the places I have visited associated with Gandhi (including Gandhi Smriti in Delhi) where he lived or worked. There is no splendour or grandeur usually expected of heritage sites. There is a bare, undecorated beauty in these places, one that accepts itself and all its visitors unconditionally. It is this all-embracing calmness that humbles and overwhelms me each time, leaving me moved and inspired.

In 1982, a yatri nivas (where I had the good fortune of staying) was built across the road by the government so visitors could stay or organisations engaged in socially productive work could use the venue for their meetings and retreats.

But for all its austerity, Sevagram does not suggest that we slip into primeval times. It boasts of housing the first rural medical college, along with an engineering institute. The road down Bapu Kuti leads to many small cooperative societies named after the legend and doing good business. All of this makes one reconsider whether the only way to meet development is to cartwheel into it headlong. And it makes visitors have second thoughts about slotting people as heroes and villains, instead of finding the good that we can in them, learning from it, and moving on.

First published in thREAD, The Hindu, 2 May 2018.

Heroes must fall

No room for those who perform
"nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love"
And, at times,
Are human enough to err

We'd rather sculpt heroes,
Carry them high above our heads
So we can pretend we can't reach them,
Can't do what they do.

As the burden grows heavier,
And we, as they,
Falter under the weight
We drop them by the wayside as sinners.

First published in Madness Muse Press, 11 Jun 2018.

Agatha Christie’s unassuming sleuths: How Agatha Christie’s leads broke the stereotypes around detective heroes

Sherlock Holmes, as sired by Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, is a character that is terse, dashing, and looks as competent as he is. His aide, the poor Dr Watson, has difficulty getting past the “elementary” with him. Holmes seems to rely upon little else other than mysteries to provide him the joie de vivre of life.

With this bowl of curd hung tight in the background, Agatha Christie enters the detective novel scene and starts stirring things up. Her Belgian egghead sleuth Hercule Poirot doesn’t inspire face-value confidence in his clientele. The local sheriff is prone to shooting himself when he spots Poirot’s waxed moustache twitch at the scent of evidence invisible to the cops’ naked eyes. Hercule is as particular about his egg as about his tie, and is allergic to asymmetry. Other characters take these apparent peculiarities as a mark of Poirot being out of focus, when he is actually the precise opposite. He believes in maintaining the order of things, and is greatly perturbed when a crime sets the world in disarray. With his clear goal of restoring this lost order, he proceeds through backward design and succeeds in shining the spotlight on the wrongs done and the culprit behind it.

Christie achieves a brilliant stroke in drawing Poirot’s character, because with it she proves that the hero is the chap with the “little grey cells”, not the fine grey suit. This immediately makes him more relatable to readers, makes him more human.

Poirot isn’t the only sketch, which makes look pale detectives to have come before him. Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie is also the genius behind Jane Marple, in many ways an even more radical conception than that of Poirot. A frail, old, lady is not someone a person usually imagines when thinking of a nimble private eye. Christie knows this and dear Miss Marple unapologetically exploits this typecasting to her advantage. Looking for clues, she wanders into bedrooms and apologises for being lost when someone spots her. People around her expect her to gossip because she is a woman, and she doesn’t let them suspect she is onto something as she lures them with her wide eyed wonder into sharing confidences and rumours.

Tommy and Tuppence, two young investigators also produced by the author, rely on wits and not weapons. They are fallible enough to have started their careers with blackmailing.

All of these characters devised by Christie are trained by her not just to conduct a mechanised unravelling of the case but to probe into the very heart of human condition. Parker Pyne, the hero of some of her novels, “investigates” but calls himself a “heart specialist”. His advertisement is an advisory: “Are you happy? If not, consult Parker Pyne.” In some of the books, the person who decodes the mystery is not a detective at all.

Christie’s characters and their methods tell us that heroes are not extraordinary in themselves but become heroes because of what they are able to make of the ordinary with their wit, presence of mind and understanding of human nature. Neither are villains manifestations of evil descended upon the earth, which is why the author writes: “There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.” Christie shows us our potential and our possibilities through her detectives, and warns us against some of our frailties and foibles through her villains. She reminds us that it is we who make the choice each time, oftentimes by a narrow margin.

First published in Distinguished Magazine, Mar 2018.