BJP RSS MJ Akbar #MeToo sexual harassment Me Too: Congress demands MJ Akbar should 'either explain sexual misconduct allegations or resign forthwith' Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi questioned Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj's decision to not comment on the issue on Tuesday saying that she should stand up for the women reporting abuse by Akbar. Modi government Sonia Gandhi Raghu Dixit, Rohit Roy, Srijit Mukherjee, Anu Malik, Kailash Kher debut on #MeToo list While Vinta Nanda’s #MeToo account involving Alok Nath was followed by the actor conveying through his lawyer that he had taken ill and would respond to the allegations after recuperating, Sandhya Mridul, Following #MeToo allegations, AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi demands that Prime Minister Narendra Modi sack MJ Akbar immediately All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM) party president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi on Wednesday demanded from Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he sacks Union Minister MJ Akbar from the cabinet immediately Prime Minister Narendra Modi #MeToo: Here are the men who are accused of sexual harassment 01:43 Jammu and Kashmir Dhaka Declaration #MeToo: Sandhya Mridul backs Vinta Nanda; shares her traumatic experience with Alok Nath After Vinta Nanda’s explosive sexual harassment and rape allegations concerning ‘sanskari actor’ Alok Nath, Bollywood actress Sandhya Mridul also shared her horrific experience working with the veteran actor in a telefilm titled Kodaikanal. ByHighly-placed sources in theand thesay, called out in, will be given the chance to step down as soon as he returns from official engagement in Nigeria.MJ Akbar, who is neck-deep in allegations ofof all manner, is almost certain to be asked to quit as a minister shortly after he returns from Nigeria on Thursday. “There is huge discomfort in the government and the indefensible cannot be defended,” said a top source in the union cabinet.A high-level BJP source said: “Of course, action will be taken against him (Akbar).” The only “concession” the junior minister of foreign affairs will be granted is a chance to “explain” the charges against him, ranging from molestation, lewd propositions and sexual comments against his young colleagues when he was the editor of two major newspapers -- The Telegraph and The Asian Age. “We have to appear fair and procedural,” the cabinet source said.Thewas pushed to act against Akbar after the RSS made it clear that it will not brook a “moral slur” on its “character” and conduct. The government and the BJP’s initial response was that the charges on Akbar related to a period when he was a newsperson although his stint at The Asian Age came after he served the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi for a while but quit following differences with. “Looked at objectively, the allegations go back to the eighties and nineties when the BJP was not on his radar. In fact, during that period he was a fierce opponent of ours,” a party source said.The argument did not wash with the RSS and sections of the BJP that felt that the muck raised by every incriminating first-person account of Akbar from women journalists, most of who went on record, was sticking on the Modi government, six months before it faces the Lok Sabha polls. Akbar is a Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh, a state that votes in November. The BJP feared that the Congress would make the sexual harassment saga into a major election issue.Second, a major plank of the Modi government was the policies and schemes it had adopted for women, the most celebrated being the “Beti bachao, beti padhao” campaign, implemented through subsidies and freeships handed out to poor and disadvantaged women. BJP sources admitted that each major atrocity against women committed in BJPruled states such as Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh took away from the slogan’s credibility.The twitter storm against Akbar was triggered with senior journalist Priya Ramani naming Akbar amid the ongoing #MeToo movement, and posting an article she had written in 2017 (in which she hadn’t named him). At least six other journalists came forward after Ramani’s article, accusing Akbar of harassment.If Akbar is asked to go, he will be the NDA government’s third casualty to be felled by gender-related charges. In January 2017, V Shanmughanathan, an RSS pracharak who was appointed as the Meghalaya governor, put in his papers after a slew of sexual harassment cases surfaced. Meghalaya’s women’s organisations started a signature campaign against Shanmughanathan for turning Shillong’s Raj Bhawan into a “young ladies’ club. He was asked to go immediately.In August 2018, Ganganagar MP Nihal Chand Meghwal was dropped from Modi’s ministerial council after the government found it untenable to answer an old rape charge against him. Meghwal was inducted when the government was sworn in May 2014 despite the rape charge being in the public domain. The Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje was against the induction but the central leaders played on the point that Meghwal was a Dalit and “unfairly victimised”.In Akbar’s case, there is no such extraneous circumstance that could bail him out, not even his being a Muslim, a rarity in the BJP. “He’s not a community leader,” a BJP source said. Sources said he was taken in the government whenfelt he needed to repair India’s relations with West and Central Asia and recast the BJP’s image in the Islamic countries, after it took a serious beating post the 2002 Gujarat violence. Akbar’s scholarship on political Islam is globally recognised and he was a regular delegate at the annual meetings of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.Akbar began his ministerial stint in August 2016 with a visit to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. BJP sources acknowledged that India’ s strategic engagements with the Middle East got a big fillip under the Modi government for which the groundwork was done “entirely” by Akbar.More importantly, from the BJP and the Centre’s perspective, thanks to Akbar’s old equation with the OIC, the organisation in its last meeting at Dhaka in May 2018, avoided taking a significant stand onin the. Only one of the 39 resolutions the meeting adopted mentioned J&K and along with 12 other Muslim-majority states or regions regarded as conflict zones.<doc-sep>Central minister and former journalist MJ Akbar named in ‘Me Too’ movement Several women have come forward with allegations that Akbar behaved inappropriately with them, and followed a pattern of interviewing women in hotel rooms. news Me Too The Indian media’s #MeToo moment has now reached the shores of the central government. Minister of State for External Affairs and former founding editor of The Telegraph MJ Akbar has been accused of inappropriate behaviour and sexual harassment by multiple women online. In a pattern that can be seen in all these accounts, Akbar has been accused of interviewing women journalists in hotel rooms, and asking them to “sit on the bed” during the interview, making them feel extremely uncomfortable. One of the first allegations against Akbar came from journalist Priya Ramani, who had written a post a year ago about a ‘male editor’ who behaved inappropriately, although she hadn’t named him then. On Monday, Priya revealed on Twitter that she was referring to MJ Akbar in her October 2017 article in Vogue. The account, titled Dear Male Boss, was about an incident in 1994 when the unnamed man (now revealed to be MJ Akbar) interviewed her in a plush south Mumbai hotel, offered her a drink that she refused, and asked her to sit next to him on the bed. Priya also alleged that he sang her romantic Hindi songs after enquiring after her musical preferences during the interview. She also talked about the nature of power and power dynamics in professional spaces, how she continued working with Akbar for several years but swore never to be alone in a room with him ever again. She ended her 2017 account in Vogue with the sentence, “We’ll get you all one day.” On Monday, she tweeted that the person she had referred to in her piece was MJ Akbar. I began this piece with my MJ Akbar story. Never named him because he didn’t “do” anything. Lots of women have worse stories about this predator—maybe they’ll share. #ulti https://t.co/5jVU5WHHo7 — Priya Ramani (@priyaramani) October 8, 2018 As has been the pattern in many of the allegations coming out over the last week, once Priya accused MJ Akbar, several other individuals came forward in the comments on Priya’s tweet to share their experience of having endured or heard of his inappropriate workplace behaviour. He was this brilliant,flamboyant #editor who dabbled in politics, who called me-my 1st job- to his hotel room to 'discuss work', after i put the edition to bed-read midnight, & made life at work hell when i refused.,cudnt speak up due to various compulsions, but yes #MeTooIndia — prerna singh bindra (@prernabindra) October 6, 2018 @It was #MJAkbar I do not say this lightly..i know the consequences of false accusations &it has been now 17 yrs &i have no concrete proof. but i was young, just made features editor, super impressed with our brilliant editor, sensitive writer(read Riot after Riot), 1/4 — prerna singh bindra (@prernabindra) October 9, 2018 2/4 but the great have feet of clay. i have narrated the story in my earlier tweets. i enjoyed our conversations-he was witty, intelligent, but this did not mean i was available.After i refused to go to thehotel at night-post putting paper to bed-things got nasty., 2/4 — prerna singh bindra (@prernabindra) October 9, 2018 he made lewd comments, once when we we had a meeting with the entire features https://t.co/Na1HhVu4J3 of the girls told me later he had asked them to meet him in the hotel too. I was alone in the city, vulnerable, fighting battles on personal fronts. i kept quiet. 3/5 — prerna singh bindra (@prernabindra) October 9, 2018 OMG! He turned up at my friend's house one night for a coffee. As a single mother with a sleeping child she told him she could neither invite him in nor go out with him. From next day he made life hell for her at their workplace https://t.co/3XRj7oWK94 October 8, 2018 In this case, #MeToo. Year: 1995, Place Taj Bengal, Kolkata. After that encounter, I declined the job offer. — Shuma Raha (@ShumaRaha) October 8, 2018 So many of us have an MJ story. "Can I come over to your house with a bottle of rum?" he said. NO, was the answer.... Couldnt 'do' anything. Some dont get the meaning of No... they move on to the next, dont they https://t.co/eMnO6Y3PNX — Harinder Baweja (@shammybaweja) October 8, 2018 Social media commentators in the comments on Priya's tweet have called for the Minister to resign in the face of these allegations.<doc-sep>He was first named on Monday by senior journalist Priya Ramani, who retweeted an article she had written for Vogue India a year ago titled "To the Harvey Weinsteins of the world", where she recounted what she called her first experience of workplace harassment.<doc-sep>New Delhi: Even as the opposition continues to demand the resignation of journalist-turned-minister MJ Akbar, sources in the government said that the BJP leader has no plans to cut short his Nigeria trip and return to India to address the charges against him. Earlier, sources in the government had said that the authorities had asked Akbar to immediately return to India. Officials have now said that he will only return on Sunday after completing his visit to Equatorial Guinea. Akbar was in Nigeria when charges of sexual harassment was levelled against the former editor by several women he had earlier worked with in the media sector. Seven women took to Twitter to level grave charges against the junior minister. Akbar was first called out by journalist Priya Ramani, who had last year written about his alleged inappropriate behaviour for a magazine without taking his name. She has now confirmed in a tweet that the allegation was against Akbar. Akbar, who has been the editor of prominent newspapers like The Telegraph, Asian Age and The Sunday Guardian, is a member of the Rajya Sabha from the BJP. The opposition, led by Congress, has launched a sharp attack on the Centre for not acting against Akbar despite the grave allegations against him. The Congress has said that Akbar must either offer a satisfactory explanation on the allegations or resign immediately, even as it demanded an inquiry into his conduct. "If Justice Kavanaugh in America could be asked to answer for something he did in his youth, Shri M J Akbar did whatever he did much later in his life than his counterpart in America," Congress leader Jaipal Reddy said. The CPI(M) and AIMIM, too, have demanded the Union minister’s resignation. The CPI(M) said, "Since these are serious charges, M J Akbar's continuance as a the Minister of State in the Central government is untenable. He should immediately resign from office." With mounting pressure on the BJP-led Union government, several ministers, including Sushma Swaraj, Nirmala Sitharaman and Smriti Irani, declined to comment on the matter.<doc-sep>
Akbar is the latest in a string of influential men to be named in the MeToo movement. (Photo: PTI/Reuters) The Congress party has demanded the resignation of Union Minister MJ Akbar after allegations of sexual assault against came out in the public domain. Speaking at a press conference, Congress leader Jaipal Reddy said, "Union Minister MJ Akbar should either give a satisfactory answer to the allegations or he should resign. We demand an inquiry into the matter." Akbar, a former journalist and now the Minister of State for External Affairs, has been accused of sexually harassing woman journalists during his time in the media. The Congress also targeted External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for her silence on the issue. "We had hoped that women cutting across political lines will come out in support of these brave women who have now come out and revealed their ordeal and tragic stories. Unfortunately, Sushma Swaraj, to whom many look up to for inspiration, has chosen to stay quiet," said Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi. All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party (AIMIM) president Asaduddin Owaisi also condemned Akbar and demanded his resignation. "Horrible this bloody perpetrator MJ Akbar shame on you and you stood in parliament during Triple Talaq Bill and spoke about Muslim women empowerment and to stop their exploitation, PMO India sack this Minister of yours if you truly believe in Beti Bachao", he tweeted. A day after journalist Priya Ramani levelled allegations against Akbar, who is a junior External Affairs Minister, another of his former colleague Prerna Singh Bindra came up with charges of sexual harassment. Ramani had on Monday tweeted about a piece she had written for The Vogue magazine in 2017. "I began this piece with my MJ Akbar story. Never named him because he didn't "do" anything," she had said and even called Akbar "a predator." Since Ramani revealed on Twitter that the person she was talking about in her 2017 article was MJ Akbar several other woman journalists have come forward with similar stories about Akbar holding interviews in hotel rooms. Expressing concern over the instances of alleged sexual harassment, the Editors Guild of India has called upon the news media organisations to conduct unbiased probes into all such cases. The Guild said it unequivocally condemns all "predatory conduct" by such men. Meanwhile, the first strong reaction from the government on this issue has come from Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi who called for an "investigation" when asked about the "allegations against a minister" in the government. (with inputs from PTI) READ| Imaginary, baseless: Soli Sorabjee rejects MeToo allegations against him WATCH| MJ Akbar accused of sexual harassment by senior journalist