In India we are leap years away from giving women a just work environment.
The unlamentable fall of Phaneesh Murthy should have been a clear signal of zero tolerance by managements towards sexual harassment. The collective tut-tutting by the IT industry — ‘message to all leaders in business’, ‘right decision’ etc — should have come with the acknowledgement that sexual harassment in the workplace does exist. In fact, neither has happened.
Murthy hasn’t been sacked for sexual harassment, as some headlines seem to suggest. He’s been shown the door for failing to report a relationship with a subordinate, a decision taken after she threatened legal action against the company (iGate) and Murthy. A potential multi-million lawsuit can be a rather powerful motivation to act.
In India, we’re leap years away from giving women a just work environment. Namita Bhandare writes.
The unlamentable fall of Phaneesh Murthy should have been a clear signal of zero tolerance by managements towards sexual harassment. The collective tut-tutting by the IT industry — ‘message to all leaders in business’, ‘right decision’ etc — should have come with the acknowledgement that sexual harassment in the workplace does exist. In fact, neither has happened.
Murthy hasn’t been sacked for sexual harassment, as some headlines seem to suggest. He’s been shown the door for failing to report a relationship with a subordinate, a decision taken after she threatened legal action against the company (iGate) and Murthy. A potential multi-million lawsuit can be a rather powerful motivation to act.
Facts are still emerging, and they aren’t pretty. The woman who has levelled the charges against Murthy says her employment at the IT outsourcing company depended on her relationship with Murthy. When she tried to call it off, he threatened her continued employment, say her lawyers. They claim she then got pregnant and refused to have an abortion as demanded by Murthy who finally asked her to quietly leave to ‘protect his position’. That is when Murthy reported the relationship and iGate swung into action with an internal inquiry that led to his ouster. The company could now be asked in court what it knew about its former CEO’s past reputation — Murthy was sacked in 2002 from Infosys on sexual harassment charges that were eventually settled out of court — and what steps it took to ensure its women employees were protected.
Murthy claims the charges against him amount to ‘extortion’ and that the relationship was consensual. It doesn’t matter. When the CEO of a company chooses to get entangled with a subordinate it is just plain murky. Supervisors are in custodial positions, they wield power over subordinates. When that supervisor is the company’s top dog, those powers are magnified. Murthy, and iGate, should have known better.
Mercifully, Indian industry isn’t shedding any tears for Murthy. Yet, welcoming his ouster as a ‘right decision’, NASSCOM chairman KK Natarajan stopped short of admitting just how rampant the problem could be in India. In 2010, a survey of 600 women employees in the IT and outsourcing industry across Indian cities conducted by the Centre for Transforming India found that 88% had faced some sort of sexual harassment at work, in most cases from a superior. In Bangalore, the Karnataka Labour Department received 700 complaints last year — all anonymous and, therefore, unactionable. Is Murthy’s behaviour a one-off as Natarajan seems to imply and, if not, is he just the tip of what is corporate India’s dirty little secret?
The only law that governs workplace sexual harassment in India was finally passed only this year, 16 years after the Supreme Court first set out guidelines. It defines sexual harassment (physical contact, asking for sexual favours, making sexually coloured remarks, showing pornography and any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature) and contains a provision to punish false and malicious complaints. Multinationals like P&G, Coca-Cola and Essar are reported to have policies on office relationships and codes to prevent sexual harassment.
But, warns Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, the threat of legal action ‘can create real barriers’ to conversations and the daily interaction between men and women in the workplace. Anyone making even a benign inquiry — do you have kids — could be charged with discrimination, she writes in Lean In.
In India, we’re leap years away from that sort of litigation (and certainly that level of financial damages). Going by precedent, women who complain of sexual harassment at work rarely have a happily-ever-after ending.
The story of Indian Air Force officer Anjali Gupta is a cautionary tale. In 2005, she levelled sexual harassment charges against three seniors including an air vice marshal. Rejecting calls by women’s groups for an independent investigation, the IAF went on to promoting the accused officers while Anjali was dismissed from service on grounds of indiscipline.
In 2011 Anjali Gupta was found dead at her house in Bhopal. She had hung herself.
On Mother’s Day, spare a thought for the sufferings of millions of women. Namita Bhandare writes.
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Tomorrow I will not be gifting my mother either flowers or a card. No spa treatment. No manicure-pedicure. Like all the other 364 days this year, I will call her, perhaps pop in to fill her medicine box, make sure she has lunch on time, exchange a bit of family gossip, bring her up to speed with her grandkids. But, no plans for a card.
Why not? Perhaps it is because I’m struck by a sense of grammatical confusion on where to place the apostrophe. Is it mothers’ day, a day that celebrates all mothers all over the world, or is it mother’s day, a day devoted to the woman who brought you up (and, with a bit of luck, drilled a sense of grammar into you?).
Still, to each their own. If you’re planning to buy stuffed toys and book a table for brunch, by all means go ahead. I certainly lucked out: brunch and an uphill hike was my splendid celebration gifted by my daughters, a week in advance.
But not all of us are as lucky. If it is mothers’ rather than just mother’s day, you might want to spare a thought for mothers who aren’t as lucky. Mothers who, for instance, battle inequity and indignity as the victims of domestic violence which in India kills more women than those killed by terror attacks every year — 8,383 deaths due to domestic violence in 2009, compared to 2,231 in terror attacks for the same year.
Spare a thought also for that traumatised mother who watches over her raped and sodomised four-year-old daughter as she recovers at AIIMS. What kind of courage does such a mother summon as she consoles her child so unspeakably brutalised? How long before she can go back to work as a domestic helper, leaving her child alone at home? Will she battle for justice or will she, like so many others, give up and just try and get on with her life?
Spare a thought for the mothers of those daughters who report a rape every 20 minutes — and the countless others who don’t. Spare a prayer for the mothers of one in three daughters between the ages of 19 and 49 who in a startling national family health survey said they had experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence.
Spare a thought for the widows, most of them mothers, dumped in ashrams in Vrindavan and Mathura. They wait for death and salvation, dependent on the charity of others, abandoned by their families, shunned by society.
Spare a thought also for the findings of State of the World’s Mothers (2013) by the NGO Save the Children. It lists the mothers we will never know; those 56,000 who die in childbirth in India every year due to excessive bleeding, anaemia, high blood pressure, unsafe abortions or infection — mostly preventable at a small cost. It lists for the first time the 309,000 children who will not live beyond a day after being born — that’s in India alone.
Yes, we’ve made huge strides in tackling maternal mortality, cutting by nearly half the number of deaths since 1990. Still, we come out as the country with the most maternal deaths anywhere in the world — more than even Nigeria — or to look at the story another way, India accounts for 19 per cent of the world’s maternal mortality deaths.
“Any report on the state of the world’s mothers is by definition a report on the state of the world, full stop,” writes Melinda Gates in the introduction to State of the World’s Mothers (2013). Adds Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children, US, “Every night millions of mothers around the world lean over their sleeping newborns and pray that they will be safe, healthy and happy.”
If mother’s day is to have any meaning beyond a hastily bought card, it must become mothers’ day. It must become a day when we pledge to the physical, financial and social well being of every mother, every daughter, every woman on this planet. Happy Mothers’ Day.
