MJ Akbar should be asked to step down, demand women journalists

Minister of State for External Affairs, M J Akbar, leaves MEA at South Block, in New Delhi, on Monday. Pic/PTI

A group of women journalists has written to President Ram Nath Kovind, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding the dismissal of Union Minister, M J Akbar.The Network of Women in Media in India also demanded that the Ministry of External Affairs should ask him to step down pending a probe.

Besides the 15 women who have narrated incidents where Akbar sexually harassed them, 19 women told Patiala House Court that they will testify about their own experiences with him while they worked in Asian Age between 1993-2000.

The women said Ramani had "lifted the lid on the culture of casual misogyny, entitlement and sexual predation that Akbar presided over at The Asian Age". The website Scroll.in listed the 19 as: Meenal Baghel, Manisha Pande, Tushita Patel, Kanika Gahlaut, Suparna Sharma, Ramola Talwar Badam, Kaniza Gazari, Malavika Banerjee, A T Jayanthi, Hamida Parkar, Jonali Buragohain, Sanjari Chatterjee, Meenakshi Kumar, Sujata Dutta Sachdeva, Hoihnu Hauzel, Reshmi Chakraborty, Kushalrani Gulab, Aisha Khan and Kiran Manral.

Defamation case to be heard on Oct 18
Union Minister M J Akbar's defamation case against journalist Priya Ramani, who had accused him of sexual harassment, will be heard on Thursday, October 18. "The defamation case will be heard by a magisterial court in the Patiala House court complex on October 18," Akbar's Counsel, Sandeep Kapur,
said on Tuesday.

'BJP IS INSENSITIVE'
BSP statement
'In this whole M J Akbar episode, the anti-women face of the BJP government has been exposed. By not asking the minister to resign, BJP is being arrogant and insensitive'

Rahul Gandhi
Congress president
'The BJP's slogan of beti bachao, beti padhao must now be reframed into BJP ke mantri aur MLA se beti bachao'

Some more allegations against akbar
' In an article released by Scroll.in, former journalist Tushita Patel has accused M J Akbar of harassing her when she was a trainee in The Telegraph, and again in 1993, when she joined Deccan Chronicle as a senior sub-editor. Akbar was the editor-in-chief of the newspaper then. Referring to the minister, she has shared a couple of her encounters with him. Speaking about one such incident, she said, "You came in to town and summoned me to your hotel to discuss my pages. I was late (I had to finish my pages). When I reached your room, you were sullen, sitting there drinking tea and in a vile mood. You started yelling at me about being late, about my work. I was trying to mumble some words. Suddenly you got up, grabbed me and kissed me hard - your stale tea breath and your bristly moustache are still etched in the recesses of my memory. I wriggled out and ran till I reached the road, jumped into an auto rickshaw and started crying."

' In a personal blog written by Swati Gautam for an online news portal, she talks about her encounter with Akbar when she went to invite him for the annual Father Jorris Memorial Nihil Ultra Debate, at St Xavier's College (Calcutta) Alumni Association, of which she was the convener, at his room in the Taj Hotel. She says, "The door opened and the Bathrobe welcomed me. Mr Bathrobe was on the bed while I was kind of squirming on the single sofa in the room, unable to exactly fathom what in hell was the matter with the world, which seemed perfectly normal sometime back. Bending down, he rolled the glass in his hand towards me. He verbally prompted me to make the drink. When my initial shock wore off, I too bent down and rolled it back at him. That buoyed me up. Giving him a hard stare, I got up and walked out of that dratted room and as far away as I could from The Bathrobe, thankful that he didn't 'do' anything."

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