Watch This Space

The internet, especially its various gateways to self-empowerment, has proven to be a boon for a country as diverse and socially stratified as India, but its work is far from done.

- Mallika Khanna

When Me Too hit India last October, it felt like something of an inevitability. Online spaces had been simmering since Nirbhaya, and hashtag activism around it felt like the logical conclusion to this online accumulation of rage.

India’s #MeToo was the case study in the convergence of online and offline activism. Twitter handles of popular feminists shared DMs from victims who wanted their stories heard. Screenshots circulating online led to the formation of workplace committees to address harassment and of grievance circles where victims shared their stories in public spaces. It was one of those gargantuan moments in the history of feminism when a new medium for activism had finally started to show the extent of its power.

As with every online campaign or movement that urban feminists have championed in the last decade, #MeToo was tainted by the blot of elitism. Domestic workers were underrepresented. Dalit women were underrepresented. Women in the farthest corners of rural India weren’t represented at all. This was, by no means, an inclusive movement.

Those at the heart of it dismissed these critiques, claiming that it’s dangerous to invalidate a movement because it isn’t inclusive enough. A fair point. After all, the urban upper-middle-class women who were most empowered by Me Too had a lot to be angry about: street harassment; workplace sexism; the constant, leering threat of rape, regardless of privilege. And considering the much narrower exclusivity of feminist movements championed by this milieu before — think the Pink Chaddi campaign, Blank Noise, The Friday Convent — Me Too’s embrace of its own critics and criticism along the way did a lot to ‘visibilise’ marginalised people. In some ways, it felt like a real sign of progress.