Vanitha, one of Kerala’s most popular women’s magazines published by the Malayala Manorama group, chose for its January cover a smiling portrait of Malayalam actor Dileep, along with his wife and two daughters. The picture-perfect image caused a furore. Actor Swara Bhaskar tweeted, “shame on you” and film critic Anna Vetticad responded, “sick”.
Dileep is under trial for his role and involvement in a 2017 sexual assault case involving a woman actor. Just days before the magazine cover, the woman had written to Kerala chief minister Pinayari Vijayan asking for justice.
The back story
On February 17, 2017, the woman actor was abducted and raped in a moving car; the act filmed. She filed a police complaint, and the first arrests were made on February 19 with more on February 23. Pulsar Suni, a driver and one of those arrested said that he had been hired by Dileep to assault the woman, film the act and hand over the visuals to Dileep. In July, Dileep was arrested and charged with paying contract money to Suni to rape the woman as a personal vendetta. He is currently out on bail.
In the five years since the assault, the case has plodded along: 38 witnesses have turned hostile, two special public prosecutors have quit, and the prosecution has sought a change of the trial judge. (see Ramesh Babu’s story here.)
On January 5, the state government moved the Supreme Court seeking a six-month extension of the trial.
New revelations
The plea for an extension follows the latest revelations against actor Dileep by film director P Balachandrakumar. In media interviews Balachandrakumar claims that he had seen Pulsar Suni at Dileep’s house in 2016. He also says that Dileep and some guests watched the video of the sexual assault at the actor’s house on November 15, 2017. One of the VIP guests present said that the initial audio was unclear and he had given the clip to a studio house in Kochi to boost it 20 times to make the audio clear.
In addition, Balachandrakumar has alleged that Dileep’s lawyers tried to influence a crucial witness to the case – an employee at a clothing store owned by Dileep and his wife. The employee, Sagar is a prosecution witness who first said Pulsar Suni was at the store a day before his arrest. But in court, Sagar turned hostile.
Based on the new evidence provided by Balachandrakumar, the survivor wants a further investigation.
Justice delayed…
The Women in Cinema Collective, formed after the assault in response to the misogyny in the Malayalam film industry, has stood by the survivor in its demand for justice. In 2018, the government of Kerala set up a commission headed by retired judge Justice K Hema to study the situation of women in the film industry. Scores of women testified and a report was submitted to the chief minister in December 2019. Its contents have never been made public nor has it been tabled in the state assembly.
An open letter to the Malayala Manorama group and the Kerala government asks that the report is discussed with stakeholders and its recommendations implemented. It wants credible internal committees to be set up by production houses to examine complaints of sexual harassment when they occur and it wants the ongoing sexual assault trial to reach a speedy conclusion.
In January, based on Balachandrakumar’s revelations, police began a fresh probe into the case.
GOING PLACES
With her appointment as interim chairperson and managing director of ONGC, Alka Mittal has become the first woman to head India’s largest oil and gas producer. A post graduate in economics with a doctorate in commerce, she was also the first woman to join the company’s board back in 2018. She joins a tiny league of women who head energy companies in India that includes Nishi Vasudeva who was appointed to head Hindustan Petroleum in 2014 and Yasmine Hilton who became head of Shell companies in India in 2017.
Gender Tracker
Just 13 of the 92 secretaries to the Indian government are women. That’s 14%. From 1951, when the first woman, Anna Rajam George joined the Indian Administrative Service until 2020, just 13% of all IAS officers overall have been women.
(Source: IndiaSpend)
Quote/Unquote
REST IN POWER
Sindhutai Sapkal who adopted and cared for over 1,000 children at an orphanage she founded, died aged 74 on January 4 in Pune. Born to a marginalised, cattle-grazing family in Wardha, she was married at 12 to a much older man. By the time she was 20, she had given birth to three sons. But during her fourth pregnancy, her husband threw her out of the house and she was forced to give birth to a girl in a cowshed. She survived by begging and singing on trains and in temples and eventually went on to establish her orphanage in Pune.
In 2010 Anant Mahadevan made a biopic, Mee Sindhutai Sapkal that won four national film awards.
She was laid to rest with full state honours.
WATCH
If you haven’t yet heard the Tetseo sisters, Mercy, Azine, Kuvelu, and Alune, treat yourself to this song. The sisters belong to the Chakesang Naga tribe and sing in the Chokri dialect: “Life isn’t only for the beautiful and young to enjoy/Every single one of us gets a shot/How will you know what you are made of/If you don’t take a chance?” Watch video.
STORIES YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
Online ‘auction’, again
On New Year’s day, over 100 Muslim women woke up to find they had been ‘auctioned’ online on a webpage hosted on code-sharing platform GitHub, their photographs stolen from their social media accounts. The list included the mother of a missing student and a well-regarded historian in her sixties. Following outrage and the filing of police complaints in Mumbai, Delhi and Hyderabad, four arrests have been made so far – three of them by Mumbai police.
This is the fourth such sexualised ‘auction’ of Muslim women conducted in extremely degrading terms and language in the past one year, following one in May 2020, another on Eid in July and the third in a private chatroom on Clubhouse in November. In each case, police complaints were filed but no action was taken.
The auctions don’t exist in a vacuum but are a culmination of a systematic hate campaign against Muslims conducted over years, I wrote in my column.
Marital rape a ‘crime of cruelty’
Two years after a clutch of petitions seeking to criminalise marital rape were filed, a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court began hearings on January 7. Nandita Rao, additional standing counsel for the Delhi government said, “Marital rape is a crime of cruelty in India.” Colin Gonsalves, representing a woman petitioner, called marital rape the “biggest form of sexual violence”.
With no legal provision to protect them from being raped by their spouses, women are often left with no recourse but to file, at most, a case under the generic section 498-A that covers domestic violence.
The central government maintains that marital rape cannot be made a criminal offence as it will destabilise the institution of marriage and become a tool to harass husbands.
‘Gag order’ on sexual harassment cases under challenge
Bombay High Court Justice G.S. Patel’s guidelines issued in September 2020 relating to cases of sexual harassment of women at workplaces—cases must be heard ‘in camera’ and cannot be reported without the court’s permission—have been challenged in the Supreme Court, reports Abraham Thomas. The plea filed by lawyer Abha Singh calls the High Court’s guidelines a “death blow” to the freedom of speech and expression.
Panel to discuss marriage age for women has one woman
In a Parliament where only 14% of members are women, a 31-member Parliamentary panel set up to examine a bill to raise the legal age of marriage for women to 21 has just one woman member. The lone woman member, TMC’s Sushmita Dev and Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi have written to the Rajya Sabha chairman demanding the greater inclusion of women.
FIELD NOTES
Women, menstruation and the vax
Women have been complaining of irregular periods almost since the Coronavirus vaccines were rolled out a year ago. The complaints ranged from unexpected vaginal bleeding and heavier periods to a longer-than-usual gap between periods.
Medical associations and doctors tended to dismiss these complaints. For instance, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in September 2021 said it did not support a link between the vaccines and the symptoms being reported by women.
Now, a new paper finds that the vaccines do indeed impact women’s menstrual cycles. Published in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the study analysed nearly 4,000 US residents aged 18 to 45 with normal cycle lengths for three consecutive cycles before the first dose followed by four to six post vaccination dose cycles. Women who were inoculated were found to have slightly longer menstrual cycles. The effect, however, is transient and most women bounced back to normal cycles after one to months of being inoculated.
Read the paper here.
AROUND THE WORLD
Charges against Prince Andrew
Days after Ghislaine Maxwell, long-term girlfriend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was found guilty by a New York jury of sex trafficking charges, a civil case has been brought against Prince Andrew by Virgina Giuffrie alleging that he had sexually assaulted her multiple times when she was 17.
Lawyers for the Queen of England’s second son are arguing that the case be dismissed since Giuffrie was paid a $500,000 settlement by Epstein in 2009. As part of that settlement, she had agreed not to sue anyone connected to Epstein who could be a ‘potential defendant’. The judge hearing the case in New York said he would be ruling ‘pretty soon’.
Pakistan Supreme Court gets its first woman judge
Ayesha Malik, 55, has been confirmed as a judge in Pakistan’s apex court, the first woman to be appointed to the post. Malik who was elevated to the bench in the Lahore High Court is credited for banning the controversial ‘two-finger test’ that was used to determine a woman’s level of sexual activity when investigating rape cases. She is known to be active in advocating for women’s rights in Pakistan. Her elevation to the Supreme Court is not without controversy as she supersedes the top three judges of the lower court from where she has been selected.
That’s it for this week. If you have a tip or information on gender-related developments that you would like to share, write to me at: namita.bhandare@gmail.com.
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Written by Namita Bhandare. Produced by Nirmalya Dutta.