The Justice K Hema Committee report, running to a staggering 235 pages and detailing sexual harassment of women in the Malayalam film industry, published on Monday, August 19, has triggered discussion.
It revealed 17 types of abuse of women, which include discrimination in wages, threats of rape, and misuse of women’s bodies through sexual comments. It was constituted after Women in Cinema Collective called for it after 2017 attacking a Malayalam actress in a moving vehicle in Kochi. In the said case, one of the accused was Malayalam actor Dileep.
The Hema Committee report has also invited reactions from many in Mollywood, including actors Revathy and Ranjini.
In an exclusive interaction with News18 Showsha, the actor, who was the first in the #MeToo storm in India back in 2018 when she accused Nana Patekar of sexual misbehavior in the shooting of Horn Ok Pleassss, shares her views on the Hema Committee report. She says, “These committees and reports—I don’t understand them; I think they are useless, and again, it took seven years to prepare a report of the events that occurred in 2017.”
She regards the Vishakha Committee, the women’s grievances committee to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace, and says, “What is this new report then?
All they needed to do was arrest the accused and have an ironclad law and order system in place. I still remember the Vishakha Committee, which came up with so many guidelines and prepared several pages of reports, but what happened to them? The names of the committees keep changing.”
