Sejal Choudhary Week 8

#MeToo In India: 75 Professors, 30 Institutes, What Happened To Raya Sarkar’s List Of Sexual Harassers?

-       Piyasree Dasgupta

This article talks about Raya Sarkar’s list of sexual harassers, also known as – LoSHA. A 24-year-old Raya Sarkar published a list of names of men who were accused of sexual harassment by women. Despite knowing the risk of this act of ‘naming and shaming’ these accused men, Sarkar went ahead with making the list public. The article was taken down, but it did not stop Raya as she went ahead and used facebook as a platform to publish this list, which later came to be known as – LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia). Women from almost 30 universities across India, US and UK contacted her expanding her list with 75 names. While some of these women decided to keep their identity anonymous, there were a few of them who publicly named their sexual harassers on social media. The result of this ‘naming and shaming’ was concrete – some of the accused were dropped from projects, faced investigation or sent on leave due to the charges against them. 

HuffPost India contacted 23 universities if they had looked into the list and taken any action to address the issue highlighted by Sarkar’s list. 20 out of these 23 universities turned a blind eye to HuffPost’s email. Despite the list being extensively viral in Indian as well as foreign media, none of these institutions in the list tried reaching Sarkar while she was sitting ready to cooperate with any enquiry regarding the list. Rutuja Shinda, a lawyer even offered pro-bono help to the victims of sexual harassment who made their harasser’s name public in LoSHA and social media. Though later on, a few of the accused in Sarkar’s list were found guilty after an investigation was done based on formal complaints that were against them. 

On a concluding note, Sarkar realised that the factor that brought a difference between the #MeToo movement before her list were the fearless women who retaliated by helping her add names or their harasser’s in LoSHA. Sarkar also said that the second wave of #MeToo changed the notion of a lot of people who used to call this movement rubbish and an opportunity for women to fulfil their personal grudge against a man by making false allegations.