Tavleen Singh, a leading Columnist associated with The Indian Express. Find all Columns from Tavleen Singh here.
Stories beyond MeToo
Indian women journalists raucously telling their own stories in the MeToo movement have rarely spoken for truly voiceless women. Instead, they have chosen to tell the stories of women powerful enough to bring down a minister.
Women journalists were the biggest winners in MeToo India. They felled a minister in the Narendra Modi government. Bollywood ladies, who started the Indian edition of this movement, still struggle to bring down the actors they have charged with being sexual predators. I am seen as a female villain of the movement because I totally oppose it. And, one reason is because I think women journalists should be speaking for those women who are totally voiceless because as journalists they have the power to do this. They have the power to speak for the little girls sold in the brothels of Mumbai and Delhi. For the little girls forced to marry old men. For those who are raped by their brothers, fathers and uncles, when they are usually too little to know that what is being done to them is wrong.
In 2016, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded 106 rapes a day. Four out of every 10 victims were little girls. The victims remain faceless and voiceless but would not be if women journalists had taken it upon themselves to tell every story in detail. This happens now and then, as when the story of the December 2012 Delhi gangrape and murder victim is so awful that it horrifies the whole country. But soon after she was raped and killed, came the story of little Gudia. She was just over five years old and not only was she raped but her rapist pushed a glass bottle into her tiny body. There are so many stories like this and they rarely make more than a paragraph on an inside page in our newspapers.
Indian women journalists raucously telling their own stories in the MeToo movement have rarely spoken for truly voiceless women. Instead, they have chosen to tell the stories of women powerful enough to bring down a minister. When I wrote against MeToo in my column, I was vilified to such an extent that at least two women journalists demanded on social media that I be sacked. And, there were many “feminists” who made disparaging references to my age. Barkha Dutt made a video in which she demanded passionately to know “why, why, why” was I so opposed to a movement that sought to empower women.
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