Four days ago, a Malayali Dalit poet resposted her MeToo statement from 2021, in which she had alleged sexual harassment by a senior member and office-bearer of the Purogamana Kala Sahitya Sangam (PuKaSa for short). The PuKaSa, a progressive cultural and literary organisation backed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala, had its state meeting a week earlier, during which new office-bearers were elected. Learning about the re-election of A Gokulendran as state secretary was what triggered her to bring the old post up again, the poet tells TNM.
The poet, now 30, alleged that Gokulendran had sexually harassed her when she was a minor, in the years between 2008 and 2012. “I used to be active in the camps held by the PuKaSa, the library council, and the Sahitya Akademy. He used to be nice to me when my father was alive and took me to the camps. But after my father passed away, his behaviour towards me changed. His conversations with me began to take a sexual tone. Once, while I was waiting for my mother to pick up my friend and me, he offered to give me a ride and said that my friend could go on their own. I said I’d only go with my friend. So then he gave a lift to both of us. He was sitting next to me, and there were other people in the car too. But I realised he was touching me inappropriately and I tried to block the advances with my file,” she says.
She began avoiding the camps, she said. Even so, she’d run into him on some occasions, during which his conversations made her uncomfortable. “One time, he spoke to me about [renowned author] Sarah Joseph’s writing and added that there was nothing wrong in writing explicitly about sex or sexual organs. Another time, he quoted a line from my poem (which roughly translates to ‘they took everything valuable and abandoned my heart’) and asked me ‘was everything valuable taken’. I understood his meaning only much later.”
Another instance she shares is about a visit to his book stall with her sister, when he allegedly told her that he would have given her sex-related books if her younger sibling was not there.
In her post, she wrote how these experiences had cost her her space, her people, her writing itself. “The last time I met him was in 2016 when I’d planned to confront him but when he came and spoke to me, I could only turn away crying,” she says.
The experience had made her mistrust men for years and she’d have panic attacks whenever she heard a story of sexual harassment. The last straw, she says, was when friends and relatives, affiliated to the CPI(M), began making calls to her mother to put pressure on her to remove her post. “I had not told my mother any of this until then. I had told my sister and a cousin. My mother would get worried.”
After her first post in 2021, her mother, a Communist sympathiser, was told by members of the party that they’d look into the allegations after the Assembly elections (of 2021). But she never got a call for any sort of investigation into the matter, she says.
When TNM called Gokulendran for his response, he said that he was kept away from the activities of PuKaSa after the allegations came up in 2021, and an investigation was conducted. “They later informed me that they’d closed the file, not able to prove anything. I understand that the woman has interpreted my actions or conversations in a certain manner, but I never spoke to her with such intentions. I have never called her to a private space alone, but only spoken to her in public spaces. I never tried to contact her. After that first post, I also stopped interacting freely with people. But whatever I say now, it will only be seen as justifications, no one will believe me,” he said.