The Ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) on Friday announced that a committee comprising four retired judges will be formed to probe the complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault against many prominent citizens of India.
"I am proposing to set up a committee with senior judicial and legal persons as members to look into all issues emanating from the #MeToo campaign," said Maneka Gandhi, Minister of Women and Child Development, in an interview to PTI.
The minister added that the committee will look into the legal and institutional framework that is in place for handling complaints of sexual harassment and advise the ministry on how to strengthen these.
Maneka Gandhi went on to state that she believes in all the survivors who have come out with their accounts and have made complaints of sexual harassment.
“I believe in the pain and trauma behind every single complaint. The cases of sexual harassment at work must be dealt with a policy of zero tolerance,” Maneka Gandhi told ANI.
#WATCH: Minister for Women & Child Development Maneka Gandhi explains about the committee which will be set up to examine all issues emanating from the #MeTooIndia movement. pic.twitter.com/Uo9qEl1wIb
— ANI (@ANI) October 12, 2018
“We have set up a group of judges who will examine some of the cases in an independent and a free-style manner, and advise us and them on where we should go from here,” she added.
Former journalist and current minister of state in the Ministry of External Affairs MJ Akbar, journalist KR Sreenivas, lyricist Vairamuthu, producer-filmmaker Vikas Bahl, directors Sajid Khan and Subhash, actors Alok Nath and Nana Patekar, are some of the prominent names against whom allegations of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault have been made. Several women have taken to Twitter to share their traumatic and gut-wrenching accounts of how they were harassed.
The Me Too wave in India, which was started last year by student Raya Sarkar, who released a List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), found a new push after actor Tanushree Dutta accused actor Nana Patekar of sexual harassment.