Omar Rashid, the contributing writer at The Wire, has been accused of sexual molestation. Screenshots of Instagram posts accusing him of the crime were widely circulated on all social media platforms.
The chilling details accused him of being a violent serial assaulter and rapist masquerading as a good man and how he used his position to initiate relationships and engage in intimate-partner violence and extreme forms of misogynistic and anti-women sexual behavior. Although the charges are on social media, no police complaints have been registered yet. The accused currently have a presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
The victim, an unnamed woman, has detailed the horrific account of sexual and mental harassment, and humiliation, and accused him of leveraging his progressive status and views within the capital’s liberal media to manipulate and exploit her. She also mentioned a long ordeal of abuse – repeated rape, forced consumption of beef (to violate and disrespect her identity) and disregard related to her physical health, resulting in medical complications.
The deafening silence of all left-leaning liberal media, social justice organizations, and activist circles – who have time and again positioned themselves as champions of women’s rights after all these revelations mirrored the hypocrisy surrounding women’s rights. The Wire issued a brief and measured statement acknowledging the matter, but the progressive ecosystem has failed to express the same outrage or solidarity routinely demanded in other cases. No opinion editorials, solidarity posts, or social media campaigns are in sight or activist eruptions like when the first whiff of allegations surfaced to other ideological camps. This conditional accountability and intellectual dishonesty have made the ecosystem reticent in such cases. A lens of skepticism is applied selectively, even while claiming to champion women’s rights.
The pattern of selective outrage is not new. The tone, energy, coverage, and herd mentality highlight a pattern in these cases. The cancel culture of the leftist academia, media, and art industry uses it according to their convenience which reveals a deeply selective and partisan pattern. Their accusations are not dictated by principles but by political allegiance. If an opposite ideology member is accused of sexual misconduct – the response is immediate and absolute. The case of M J Akbar, the former union minister, and the late Vinod Dua, a former journalist are two contrasting examples. The former case received swift condemnation and trial for which he had to resign from his post, while the latter from a coterie of intellectual liberals received a nuanced or even defensive response from ideological allies. Although the accusations are proved in court, here the highlighted issue is of strategic silence and their weapon of Cancel culture turns pious and silent when people of their rank or ecosystem are accused of any allegation. The uneven reporting leads to the politicization of cancel culture dressed in moral clothing.
The accuser has also accused that this case will not be the #Metoo movement, it’s a #Wetoo movement. The collective conscience of the Metoo movement that provides a voice to lots of women by calling their abuser seems to be polluted by devoidness of ethical consistency.
Accusations against political adversaries are often accepted at face value, while those against ideological allies are met with skepticism, demands for more evidence, or outright denial. This cherry-picking erodes the credibility of women’s movements that have struggled hard to claim
public space demanding justice.
The silence is not about two people or their public images, this creates real and damaging consequences for society in the future. The isolation leads to the demeaning of victims, sufferings are ignored, the patterns of abuse are institutionalized, and the new age women’s movement – its credibility is severely undermined. These abusive patterns become cyclical, reinforcing a culture of impunity and betrayal. The uncomfortable silence series needs to be broken up by the ecosystem and should confront its complicity.
The allegations need thorough and transparent investigation and justice for the victim. But these cases also demand accountability from those who have built their career and reputations from progressive values. This hypocrisy needs to be confronted, and the same moral and scrutiny need to be applied putting aside ideological biases. Ideology and justice should not part ways at the altar of ideological convenience.
Sandeep Bhardwaj is a Ph.D scholar.
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