Original Post by on Medium

Harvey Weinstein, through his misdeeds & serial abuse of actresses in Hollywood may have ruined many lives and spirits. But the silver lining to that is that it has prompted women to come out and speak about sexual harassment openly, making the #MeToo campaign viral. A follow-up poll by ABC News- Washington Post found that sexual harassment in the US is a full-blown epidemic with over 50% women responding that they have faced such harassment at some point in their lives, and about 30% reporting harassment at work and 25% facing harassment from men who had power over their careers. Less than 42% of the women harassed in the workplace have ever reported such incidents to someone in a supervisory or monitoring capacity. This is despite the fact that US has institutional policies & laws that deter such harassments.

As a follow-up to the events of the #MeToo & the spin-off #HimToo campaign, C Christine Fair, a distinguished associate professor at Georgetown University and an expert on South Asia, published in Huffington Post, a detailed personal experience of sexual harassment by well-known academics, who, at that time, had deterministic power over her career. Inspired by Fair, Raya Sarkar, who hails from India and studies law at UC Davis, has curated a “Hall of Shame” list of Indian origin male academics, teaching in leading institutions in India and the West, who have allegedly sexually harassed their students. According to Raya, this list is based on students’ first-hand accounts. This list is currently live & growing, has around 70 names, and some of the alleged perpetrators have significant professional accomplishments and clout.

However, Raya’s list has become famous for a very different reason as well. It has kickstarted a debate amongst the feminists, which, inadvertently perhaps, has shifted the optics from the victims and alleged perpetrators in the list to a debate on the method of resistance. In a statement in Kafila, fourteen of India’s prominent progressive and feminists , including well known activists, academics & lawyers like Nivedita Menon, Ayesha Kidwai, Vrinda Grover, and Kavita Krishnan, have denounced Raya’s list and urged every victim of sexual harassment in academia to follow institutional policies and procedures to report those harassment in order to get justice for themselves and deter any similar misdeeds in future. In situations where effective redressal & deterrent mechanisms do not exist, they have espoused confrontation with the college & university authorities to create such mechanisms and have promised help to victims and their supporters in their struggle to change the system. They have called upon Raya to take down her list, claiming that such hit lists delegitimizes the long and arduous struggle against sexual harassment, and makes the work of sincere feminists and activists, such as themselves, very difficult.

On the other hand, Raya and her supporters accuse these Kafila feminists of being patronizing and condescending, of attempting to disrupt a spontaneous mobilization & awareness raising effort. They allege that the Kafila feminists have double standards. Some of them have advocated such lists in the past, say against offending Uber drivers. But when it comes to academia, a domain to which most of them are personally and professionally proximate, they have discredited “the list”.

An interesting twist to this debate came when Raya framed it as a Dalit versus Savarna issue. Raya, who is an Ambedkarite from a Dalit caste feels that the “establishment” Kafila feminists were silencing and delegitimizing her. Through a series of social media posts and interviews in multiple news outlets, the Raya v Kafila debate has transmogrified the core issue of sexual harassment in academia to “Savarna feminism” v “Dalit feminism” and also that of “old guard activism” versus “new age resistance” and to other stimulating questions on hegemony in general. It is not clear, on a cursory reading of Raya’s Facebook posts and interviews, if she uses the term Savarna as a metaphor for historical stifling of the underprivileged or if she had evidence of caste-based discrimination by the well-known radical voices in India. Such allegations can be very damaging and must not be made loosely and out of context. We know that Dalit activists from Chuni Kotal to Rohit Vemula have lost their lives owing to anti-Dalit discrimination in academia. Therefore, it is flippant to casually conflate an issue of disagreement on resistance methods with the very systematic structural violence against Dalits. Besides, class privilege, such as Raya’s, interferes with the dynamics of caste exploitation. It highlights that fact that not all Dalit experiences are equal and employing caste identity to win a debate undermines the day to day struggle and mobilization by backward castes.

One must note that academicians, in India, have historically been at the forefront of many progressive socio-cultural movements. However, unfortunately, like darkness under the lamp, they have not done enough to clean their own homes and make these institutions safe spaces. Many faculty members routinely exploit their positions of power & authority vis-à-vis their students, to routinely harass students in various ways. Nepotism, targeted punitive grading, frequent verbal abuse transpire alongside sexual harassment. Such coercive actions not only have future career ramifications but also leave psychological scars in victims. This is not to equate sexual harassment with other abuses of power in academic institutions or to belittle the double jeopardy of being a female student in patriarchal society, but to put things in perspective and understand sexual harassment also as a power play. There is enough research that show that sexual attacks are about domination and control and not about primordial desires. If there is an appropriate use of the Savarna-Dalit allegory, the teacher-student relationship in higher education in India would be it. Students learn to withstand and tolerate such harassment as there are few efficient institutional and legal mechanisms to challenge it. Therefore, rather than attempting to look at sexual harassment through a lens that isolates it from the other forms of harassments in the classroom, we should also look at bullying and harassment by faculty members holistically. It is very heartening that some progressive institutions in India are putting in place formal processes and bodies that will attempt to sensitize the community around gender issues and deter sexual harassment. Other colleges and universities must replicate such efforts. However, the community must not lose sight of the overall issue of harassment and make sincere attempts to reorient the teacher-student interaction into a more professional & less hierarchical relationship.

Raya’s list is not a novel idea. Recently, a few women in New York City, who work in Media & Communications, had curated such a list of male colleagues who are known sexual abusers in the workplace, but they had to take the list down in face of the coercive threat of adverse legal action and pressure from the industry insiders. Such lists do share some methodological deficiencies that make them vulnerable. One can observe some major flaws with Raya’s list.

First, much of the credibility of the list is undermined as it does not specify the nature of the offense of the accused. While the victim’s identity can remain private, the incident needn’t be. How do we distinguish folks who have made sexual assaults from those who have made unwelcome advances but did not take it forward, and those who may have made some casual unwelcome sexist remarks or jokes? While theoretically, all three amount to harassment, but from a matter of practicality, the consequences and impact of these are not the same. Unless we can completely rid ourselves of patriarchy, there will always be some form of bias against women, but one cannot adopt a “boil the ocean” towards redressal and approach all forms of offensive behavior as equal. Some of these offenses deserve formal legal recourse; others may can be simply handled by a collective ridicule & rebuke by the academic fraternity & student community. The course of common law, which Raya is undoubtedly very familiar with, makes a solid distinction between felony offenses, misdemeanors, and infractions. Unfortunately, in her list, she chooses not to make any such distinctions. Needless to say, without a mention of the offenses, many professors named in that list have expressed shock and anguish including suicidal thoughts in the face of public shaming. Some of Raya’s supporters have claimed that the accountability lies with the named offenders. But how can they defend themselves if specific charges are not mentioned?

Second, the list doesn’t bucket the names of offending faculty members in two categories –first, those who have been formally reported against and those who have not. This is an important distinction to make. Contrary to popular belief amongst some feminists, it doesn’t weaken the list, rather strengthens it with more content & authenticity. Further, as a student of law, Raya could have made her list more effective by not just maintaining a list of names, but systemically collecting evidence that could be used to take legal action against some of the offenders. Unfortunately, the way it has been architected, the list cannot stand scrutiny in any court of law, and as it stands now, amounts to a whisper-campaign published in social media.

Third, Raya has underestimated the seriousness and far-reaching impact of her work. She should have enlisted a group of like-minded individuals to curate the list rather than attempting to become the sole gatekeeper. A collective earns more public trust than an individual, especially in such sensitive matters — and many minds are better than one. This is not about her.

However, while Raya’s list can be criticized for its shortcomings, her attempt should not dismissed as the Kafila feminists have unfortunately done. The claim that the list delegitimizes their sustained efforts to reform institutions and put more institutional mechanisms in place is quite dubious. For example, RatemyProfessors.com, a public review site that allows students to rate their professors anonymously, doesn’t undermine the formal course evaluation mechanisms put in place by universities. Both serve a common purpose through different means. The formal course evaluations are more private and are an important part of performance review of a faculty member. However, they do not help incoming students to make decisions on the courses they should take or avoid. That’s where RatemyProfessors.com comes in. It empowers students with information they need to make the best decisions for themselves, whether the faculty likes it or not. Any public feedback & survey based portal has its weaknesses, but such risks do not outweigh the benefits to the weaker side in the bargain. Similarly, Raya’s list can be a very credible deterrent enabling students to make informed decisions. In addition, the list has already served its purpose by raising awareness on sexual harassment in campus and instilling real panic among the potential abusers.

This debate between the two camps of feminists reminds me of the cleavage within the radical and progressives — the leftists who are inspired by Marx & Lenin versus the libertarian socialists (anarchists) inspired by Kropotkin, Proudhon and Bakunin. Central to the debate is the role of vanguards in movements and the question of hegemony. The leftists always feel the need of a vanguard force that would need to spark and shape political activity. They prefer pathways of resistance that seize control of institutions & formal that are under the control of enemy classes. On the other hand, the libertarian socialists prefer spontaneous & sporadic insurrections with aim to destroy the existing institutional structures quickly and forever, to lay the groundwork for a new order. The anarchists dislike the vanguardism and deterministic politics and their inability to identify hegemony outside of class relationships. The leftists tend to ignore the hegemony that also exist, for example, within the communist movement and party itself. The anarchists dislike this democratic centralism that is inherent in left politics, which amount to authoritarianism, and using a layman’s term, ”My way or the Highway” mentality of the leadership. The Kafila feminists, it seems to me, are asserting their hegemony with the aim to determine the trajectory of resistance. They have outlined the deterministic pathways of combating sexual harassment, as they have been practicing, and expect others to simply follow. By doing that, they have also contributed to the false binary of new/old methods and undermined the struggle that they have led for so long.

I also want to argue that not every resistance has to be episodic or organized part of a big plan as the Kafila feminists seem to insist. In fact, such decisive events are very infrequent. However, the human spirit doesn’t cease to resist. People show their contempt against the existing hegemonic power structures through everyday forms of resistance, as James Scott has shown in his path-breaking work, “Weapons of the Weak”. Scott has studied the less visible, everyday forms of resistance, such as foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage and many more techniques employed by peasants against landlords and governments. This also sheds new light on the question of why some women who are coming out now with allegations did not raise alarm when the incidents happened. The moot point here is that people resist in their own ways and one form does not necessarily have to preclude and predetermine other ways of resistance.

The Kafila feminists feel that the list amounts to a mere slander campaign and is not a serious attempt to resist such incidents in academia. But this list has actually done a great public service. It has created a consensus that there is widespread sexual harassment in academia. Female students have always been resisting. Through whisper campaigns, they have warned other students & parents about potential sexual predators, and such awareness mechanisms have been an effective form of defense & means of everyday resistance. Every institution has its own word-of-mouth list of questionable characters amongst faculty members that students have handed down to incoming students. Raya’s list should be seen as an extension of that collective effort that harnessed the power of social media to aggregate and publicize the names of potential predators across campuses. Such resistance mechanisms have not been staple in confrontation entrepreneur’s playbooks, but that does not necessarily make it illegitimate. This great divide amongst activists did not start recently, nor is it going to end anytime soon. One just hopes well-meaning people like Raya and her supporters and the prominent personalities in Kafila can disagree without being disagreeable.