A day after facing flak for not taking any action on the complaint filed by the survivor of sexual abuse against filmmaker and one of the four Phantom partners – Vikas Bahl – fellow partners and filmmakers Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane came out with their respective statements on Sunday claiming that they tried addressing the issue as best as they could within the limitations.
In Kashyap’s two-page note the biggest reason for the lack of significant action was stated to be the absence of a misconduct clause in the Phantom contract that helped protect the “erring partner”. “I trustingly signed that contract and yes, I am an idiot to not understand what I am signing, so I should be put on the dock for that,” Kashyap said.
“On the basis of legal advice being sought then we were told we were severely handicapped by two things – that we were dealing with an equal promoter/director who actually ran the company, and that there was no provision in our contract to sack him on the grounds of misconduct,” he added. He said that according to legal advice given to him he had very limited options. “Now in hindsight and after taking stock of things myself, I can quite see how I was ill-advised,” he wrote.
So they decided to take a “moral stand”. “We first suspended him [Bahl]. We barred him from the premises, took away his signing authority. If that wasn’t enough I named and shamed him privately amongst whoever asked about it,” stated Kashyap. He also claimed responsibility for bringing out Bahl’s name publicly by speaking anonymously to Mumbai Mirror: “Nothing about it was under wraps. It’s been out there for more than a year .”
Motwane, in a statement that followed Kashyap’s, said he first came to know of the 2015 sexual harassment case in March 2017 when Kashyap brought it to their notice.
Kashyap said that producer and partner Madhu Mantena and himself sat with the survivor; the action thought out included suspending Bahl for a long time, not allowing him to produce or direct, taking away his signatory rights and sending him to rehabilitation. However, before they could formalise it, Kashyap informed them that the survivor didn’t want to pursue it any further with the boyfriend fearing her name would go public.
Motwane said his silence in media was not for being complicit but to protect the identity of the girl and make things right without assigning any doubt whatsoever to her version of what had transpired and on terms she wanted and expressly agreed to then. Kashyap stated: “We have spoken out now because she has allowed her story to be spoken out, even if only anonymously,” he said.
Kashyap ended with an apology to the survivor and an assurance that “this will never happen again on my work premises ever again (sic).” On a larger note, he went on to talk about how the industry is “ill-equipped to handle matters such as sexual harassment, copyright, censorship and all the things we put ourselves in dock with”. “I am better aware today to not allow ourselves to be in a similar place ever again,” he stated.
“Vikas Bahl is a sexual offender,” stated Motwane, “He’s preyed on a young woman, abused her trust, ruined her life. The scars are going to stay and that just isn’t right. The only thing I can offer now is an apology. And the only thing I can say is that this will never happen again on my watch.”
