Tanushree Dutta’s allegations on the sexual harassment charge against Nana Patekar is in bad taste and also out of place. Sitting in the US and seeing the support for the #meToo movement, Tanushree Dutta seems to have had ideas to resurrect it in India. So a homecoming with a #meToo Bollywood version seemed a good idea and she launched into it without mulling on the implications.
Again for any person any incident more than a decade old is water that has flowed under the bridge and long gone. It is over. People have moved on. There is no point digging out old hurts because the person whom you will hurt the most is yourself. Another aspect of the #meToo movement even in the US is that people are getting tired of it but for the Weinstein saga. You did something either on the spur of the moment or for your career or for love knowing full well the implications and then one fine day you wake up and start playing the victim. This is not acceptable behaviour among rational and sensible adults. The people on whom you cast aspersions are shocked and have to dig deeper into old wounds, maybe long forgotten.
There is a broader sociological aspect about the #meToo movement and that is what women think about themselves and their position in society today. Until the 1960’s and thereafter in the days of Women’s Lib of Gloria Steinem and others, with women burning bras in public, it was thought that the woman is now liberated from the masculine shackles in which they were supposedly chained till then.
The liberated independent woman with a mind of her own was welcomed mostly in western societies and other parts of the world to the extent that their societies would allow it. But one thinks that the #meToo movement is setting back the clock to the pre-Women’s Lib days and wanting to portray the woman as a prey, vulnerable and in need of protection both physical as well as institutional like through the judiciary or whatever. Is this not retrograde thinking for the women, propagated by the women themselves?
