MeToo panel will not hear individual cases

Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, October 16

It has only been four days since Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi promised to form an empowered committee to examine all issues emanating from the MeTooIndia movement, but excitement around the move is already waning.

It is learnt that the proposed committee won’t hear individual cases and won’t have the power to record depositions of victims who have been exposing male harassers across professions in the ongoing campaign.

It will only look at the institutional and legislative framework around sexual harassment at workplace and recommend ways of “filling the gaps”, government sources said.

Further, although the Minister of WCD earlier said the proposed panel would be on the lines of Justice JS Verma panel, early signals are it may not be along those lines after all.

The JS Verma Committee was formed under the order of then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh through a government gazette notification dated December 23, 2012. The committee had massive powers to record witnesses, hear stakeholders and recommend amendments to laws. It had executive and legal standing, being a gazette committee. The proposed MeToo panel, still in works, is expected to be a ministerial committee under the charge of the WCD Minister. It will be asked to submit a report in three months on why the MeToo movement exploded in India when there were laws in place to check sexual harassment at workplace. “The committee will tell us where the laws are falling short. We already have the anti- sexual harassment at workplace law. We also have the mandatory provision of internal complaints committees in all organisations that employ more than 10 people. But clearly the existing arrangements are falling short and the committee will look at that. It won’t hear the accounts of individual victims,” a source in the WCD Ministry said today.

The Tribune has further learnt that though Maneka Gandhi appealed to all sexual harassment victims speaking in the MeToo movement to complain to the Ministry through the “SheBox” platform or to the National Commission for Women to let the government step in, “not a single complaint has been received in the government system”.

Meanwhile, PM Modi has remained disengaged on the MeToo front, which also explains the four-day delay in the announcement of the panel Ministry proposed and also in finalisation of the panel’s terms of reference.

Further, with junior Minister for External Affairs MJ Akbar suing his accuser Priya Ramani, it remains to be seen what scope the Maneka Gandhi-proposed panel on the matter would have. Gandhi has by far been the most vocal minister in the MeToo explosion, having said that she had “complete faith in the account of every woman who was speaking up”.