Every time women produce proof of sexual harassment, the goalpost moves

From K Raghavendra Rao to the Justice Hema Committee, evidence rarely changes anything when powerful men are involved.

K Raghavendra Rao is facing criticism for touching actors Keerthy Suresh and Krithi Shetty inappropriately (left). Last year, he faced backlash after making Niharika Konidela uncomfortable with his behaviour | Photo: X and YouTube

At the muhurat for Anil Ravipudi’s Venky Anil 5 in Hyderabad a few days ago, K Raghavendra Rao, 84 years old – and four decades into being labelled a “legend” – stepped up to compose the actors for the ceremonial first shot. The Telugu filmmaker first grabbed Keerthy Suresh’s arm, drawing her closer. A moment later, he took Krithi Shetty by the arm and guided her to her spot, just the way you would slide a vase into place.

This would have been a routine interaction between an actor and a director, except Rao can be seen explaining the same shot to the film’s male leads, Venkatesh Daggubati and Kalyanram Nandamuri – all while keeping his hands to himself. This clearly isn’t Rao’s first rodeo, and social media users dug up an older video where he appears to be taking liberties with another actor.

In it, the seated Rao is seen resting his hand on Niharika Konidela’s waist, despite her obvious discomfort. Konidela, who is from the most prominent family in Telugu cinema, attempts to free herself from Rao’s grip, but he doesn’t immediately let go. It is apparent that she’s completely aware of the unwavering focus of the cameras – and the balance of power – and so wraps him in a respectable, grandfatherly hug.

A swift online backlash followed, but an X user said it best when he asked, on behalf of us all: “Why does this old man always try to touch?” But even before the criticism had quite finished taking shape, the defences were already being assembled. First of all, he was a legend, we were told. One user helpfully reminded us that Rao had “directed more than 100 films and most of them are blockbusters and superhits” and that the short video was forming “the wrong perception.”

Others suggested that we remember he was 84, presumably an age at which a man cannot be expected to keep track of his own hands. And finally, scoffed some users: If it was all so terrible, why did the actresses go back and hug him afterwards?

It probably wasn’t just fondness for the man. No one is going to flinch from a man who probably decides who gets to work in Telugu cinema. The warmth is interpreted at face value, without an understanding of the indisputable power of men like Rao, and held up as proof that nothing happened and that the rest of us are overreacting.

Two years ago, a similar situation played out in May 2024, at a promotional event for Gangs of Godavari. The actor and Andhra Pradesh MLA Nandamuri Balakrishna – known to his fans as Balayya – shoved his co-star Anjali hard enough for her to stumble on stage in front of a live audience. The actress gathered herself and then nervously laughed it off. When the controversy snowballed, she put out videos high-fiving him, and stated that he was a dear friend. The film’s producer Naga Vamsi clarified that the friendly gesture should not be misinterpreted. When someone pointed to a liquor bottle at Balakrishna’s feet, the producer labelled it CGI.

Then too, the outrage trained its guns on Anjali and her laughter. The singer Chinmayi Sripada had then said that society “refuses to hold men in power who misbehave responsible, especially when they come from money, caste and political power. Don’t come and tell women what to say and how to behave when you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

In this tired script, women don’t even have to play along to get the short end of the stick. Last year, Bhojpuri star Pawan Singh insisted on repeatedly touching his co-star Anjali Raghav’s waist during a song promotion. When she stiffened and moved away, Singh explained that he was only removing an insect. Anjali plainly said that the touch was neither invited nor acceptable, but that she was being constantly spammed by people who blamed her. Before long, Anjali announced that she was leaving the Bhojpuri industry altogether. Singh apologised soon after, though the Haryana Women’s Commission’s summons might have had something to do with it.

Goalpost on ‘evidence’ keeps getting shifted 

So much of the discourse around sexual assault and harassment demands that women produce proof of their abuse and exploitation. You cannot simply take a woman at her word, the argument runs. Even reasonable people who identify as feminists argue that the absence of credible proof only weakens a woman’s case. The absence of proof can, hypothetically, finish a man – his career, his reputation, his family. This worry is fair enough, though it would be more convincing if any of that ever happened once proof showed up.

Proof has a way of settling absolutely nothing. Even when proof exists, as it does in so many cases, it is still somehow a matter of opinion. Proof can be examined for what it is, and still be explained away. Every time we see “evidence”, the standard for what constitutes evidence rises accordingly. The goalpost, as we know it, is always going to shift.

There is no mystery to why the demand for proof functions this way. To actually believe women is to take on the inconvenience of them being right — but to remain unconvinced costs nothing. Doubt is far too useful.

Nowhere has doubt proved quite as useful as in the case of the Justice Hema Committee. Set up by the Kerala government after a leading Malayalam actor was abducted and sexually assaulted in a moving car in 2017, the committee spent years gathering first-hand testimony from women across the industry. It resulted in a landmark 235-page report that laid out the casting couch in some detail, and the “adjustments” and “compromises” women were expected to make in exchange for work. The report dwelled on the handful of men who ran the place like a cartel, and the blacklisting of anyone who declined. It is difficult to picture more compelling proof than this, overseen by a sitting judge and presented to the state’s chief minister himself.

The government took delivery of the report in 2019 and then sat on it for the better part of five years. It resurfaced only in 2024, after a prolonged fight under the Right to Information Act, and even then the names of the powerful men were redacted. Resourceful objections were mounted against the report – after all, what could anyone do until some of the women named in the report decided to pursue a case and prove their complaints from scratch?

Proof has never been the problem

When even a court-monitored report does not prove enough, the only resort some women have is to turn to their phones to hold their aggressors to account. This is the proof women are told they need – except women pay for it. In January, Shimjitha Musthafa, a 35-year-old former gram panchayat member from Malappuram, posted a video naming one Deepak who, she said, had deliberately pressed himself against her on a crowded KSRTC bus. Days later, Deepak died by suicide, and Musthafa was booked for abetment. It is a genuinely terrible turn, and not the sort of case anyone can pretend is simple.

But there is no nuance in what came next. Musthafa was sent rape and murder threats – BJP worker Ajay Marar, who had contested the 2025 Kerala municipal election, put out a video calling for her to be sexually assaulted, as a way of avenging Deepak. YouTubers and influencers picked apart the footage to assign malicious intent to Musthafa. Men’s rights activists, who have spent years lobbying for a Men’s Commission in Kerala, added her to their standing list of women who invent accusations.

The women picking up their phones to film their abuse know exactly what it will cost them. In 2023, the actor and model Nandita Sankara posted a video of a man named Savad masturbating beside her on a Kerala bus. While he was arrested, Sankara then spent two years being taken apart for her clothes and her old social media posts, as though either had the slightest bearing on what a stranger had done on a bus. In 2025, Savad was booked again while out on bail, this time for molesting a woman on a different bus.

This was the pattern before the smartphone – and this will likely continue beyond it. In 2019, accused of sexual harassment by a junior court assistant, Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi convened a Saturday bench to hear the case against himself. He called it a conspiracy to destabilise the office of the Chief Justice, and was promptly cleared. The country’s most decorated women wrestlers, taking their complaints against federation chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh to the streets in 2023, were informed by PT Usha herself that they were tarnishing the nation’s image. And RK Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, confronted with 6,000 of his own messages to a research associate, blamed a hacker.

There’s always a hacker. Otherwise, there’s CGI, or age, or a hug that can explain things away. Proof has never been a problem. The problem has always been believing women.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant Dixit)