India film sex abuse claims must be 'wake up call': campaigner

A sticker calling for justice is seen on the arm of a colleague of the trainee doctor who was raped and murdered inside the premises of R G Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata, India, August 19, 2024. REUTERS/Sahiba Chawdhary

A landmark report that revealed widespread sexual harassment and exploitation of women in a southern Indian film industry must be a "wake-up call" for men in cinema, said Bina Paul, a founder of a female rights group that pushed for the investigation.

The report by the three-member Hema Committee has rocked "Mollywood" - as the Malayalam film and TV industry is known - since its release last month, with a series of sex abuse allegations against some top male celebrities, resignations by men in powerful posts, as well as police investigations.

"This must act as a wake-up call," said Paul, an award-winning film editor and founding member of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), which works for women's rights in the movie industry in Kerala state and also prompted the formation of the Hema Committee in 2017.

"Now there will be a lot more vigilance, women themselves will ask 'Am I owed anything?', and men certainly will - and should - be more vigilant," she said by telephone from the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram. "With this spotlight, social media, you cannot hide anymore."

India's southern states, including Kerala, have vibrant and popular local language film industries, separate from the Hindi-language Bollywood.

The nearly 300-page report uncovered a range of problems faced by women, including poor working conditions such as a lack of female toilets and changing rooms on sets, a lack of legally binding contracts, irregular pay, wage gaps and demands for sexual favours in exchange for work.

"It is not a very clean space to work in where you are respected and can work with dignity," Paul said. "The Malayalam film industry is unorganised and feudal."

Even though the identities of the victims, as well as those accused of harassment were hidden in the report, Paul said it was not hard for people working within the industry to work out who the alleged perpetrators were.

There were mass resignations from the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes including its head, veteran star Mohanlal, as some of its members were thought to have been those carrying out the abuse.

While Paul said she was lucky not to have faced sexual harassment at work, she had experienced many other issues and was routinely "gaslighted".

'INGRAINED MISOGYNY'

The allegations in the report come at a time when doctors across the country are protesting against the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in the eastern city of Kolkata.

The assault on the doctor revived memories of the 2012 gang rape of a physiotherapist on a moving bus in Delhi.

A wave of #MeToo revelations hit Bollywood in 2018 and soon spread to media, sports and business, intensifying pressure on public figures, companies and organisations to take sexual harassment seriously.

But campaigners say little has changed.

"It is a powerful nexus of money, power et cetera. These are very strong systems to fight. Women need a lot of courage," said Paul, who with several other women in the movie industry formed the WCC after the abduction and sexual assault of an actress in 2017.

Paul said she and her colleagues noticed that many within the sector largely blamed the victim.

"We soon realised that there is a lot of ingrained misogyny in the film industry. It was important to come together and change things," she said, adding that the WCC had to fight to get the Hema Committee report published.

While the report was submitted to the state government in late 2019, it was only made public last month after facing a series of legal challenges from people working in Mollywood.

'NOT ENOUGH'

The report's findings sparked debate, dominated local headlines and prompted actors to call for action. Workers in other regional film industries in the states of West Bengal and Telangana demanded similar investigations and the National Commission for Women vowed to look into the matter.

Paul said that was encouraging, but more needed to be done.

"This is not enough," she said, demanding India's film industries properly implement the law on sexual harassment in the workplace, introduce gender sensitisation programmes and round-the-clock helplines for women.

She also called for transparency in pay and work schedules, for unions to be more inclusive and provide more protection for women, who, according to the report, were sometimes rejected for membership for reasons such as "advanced age".

She urged the government to initiate talks with stakeholders and involve more women in policy decisions to improve conditions in Malayalam cinema.

"Why should women not be part of an industry which is very lucrative, very creative?" asked Paul. "Women need to have equal employment opportunities everywhere."