Indian minister sues alleged victim over #MeToo claims. Mobashar Jawed Akbar says allegations made against him by 12 women are baseless.

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Mobashar Jawed Akbar has been a prominent figure in Indian public life for decades. Photograph: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters
▼ An Indian government minister accused of sexual misconduct by at least 12 women has said the claims are “wild and baseless” and filed a defamation lawsuit against one of his alleged victims.
Mobashar Jawed Akbar, India’s junior foreign minister, returned from government business in Nigeria on Sunday to face mounting allegations he harassed or abused employees during his previous career as a journalist.
“The allegations of misconduct made against me are false and fabricated, spiced up by innuendo and malice,” he said in a statement on Sunday. “Accusation without evidence has become a viral fever among some sections. Whatever be the case, now that I have returned, my lawyers will look into these wild and baseless allegations in order to decide our future course of legal action.”
On Monday, he filed a criminal defamation case against the journalist Priya Ramani, the first of the women to name him as her alleged abuser.
The lawsuit names Ramani as the sole accused and says she “intentionally put forward malicious, fabricated and salacious” allegations to harm Akbar’s reputation.
Ramani responded in a statement that “rather than seek to engage with the serious allegations that many women have made against him, [Akbar] seeks to silence them with intimidation and harassment”. She would fight any charges, she said.
Akbar, 67, is one of the highest-profile figures to be named in the past fortnight as part of a wave of sexual misconduct allegations by Indian women that activists are calling the belated arrival of India’s #MeToo moment.
He had been silent since the first accusation surfaced on Tuesday, when Ramani claimed he was the unnamed editorshe had described sexually harassing her in a 2017 article for Vogue.
At least 11 other women have come forward in the week since, the most recent on Friday when Majlie de Puy Kamp, a journalist with CNN in New York, said Akbar forcibly kissed her when she was an 18-year-old intern at his newspaper Asian Age in 2007.
“What he did was disgusting, he violated my boundaries, betrayed my trust,” De Puy Kamp told Huffington Post India.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has not commented on the allegations but the textiles minister, Smriti Irani, called for Akbar “to speak on this issue”. She said: “Anybody who is speaking out should in no way be shamed, anybody speaking out should in no way be victimised or mocked.” (▪ ▪ ▪)

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