Hema Committee report: all 35 cases closed, and we moved on

In June 2025, the Special Investigation Team constituted by the Kerala government told the Kerala High Court that it had closed all 35 cases registered on the basis of the Justice K. Hema Committee report, because not one of the women who had testified to the committee was willing to give a statement to the police. The number that should stop you is not 35. It is six, as in the six years between the day those women spoke and the day the state finally came back and asked them to say it again.

This is what a viral clip is actually doing

Which brings us to the thing that happens roughly once a month now. A few seconds of set footage surfaces. A hand on a face. A pause that reads wrong. It moves through Instagram and X and a hundred aggregator pages in a day, collects a hundred thousand furious comments, and by Thursday it is gone.

Everyone involved gets something out of it. The aggregator gets reach. The commenters get the clean feeling of having been angry about something. The clip gets stripped of context, because context does not travel. And the woman in the frame, who did not consent to any of it, becomes the week's argument. She is discussed, defended, doubted and dropped, and at no point in the cycle is she asked what she wants.

Nobody in that chain files anything. Nobody checks whether that production had an Internal Complaints Committee. Nobody asks the production house for a statement. There is no follow-up on Monday, because there is never any follow-up on Monday. The outrage is complete in itself, which is precisely why it is useless. Thirty-five closed cases in Kerala are the receipt for that: a country capable of enormous public fury about this, and structurally incapable of converting one gram of it into a conviction.

It is worth being honest about the cost. The people the clip hurts most are almost never the people it targets. A director with a lawyer survives a bad week. A junior actress becomes searchable forever, attached to an incident she never described, in language she never chose.

What actually happened to the Hema Committee cases

All 35 cases registered from statements given to the Justice Hema Committee were closed in June 2025. The Special Investigation Team informed the Kerala High Court that the complainants did not cooperate with the investigation, and that closure was the only remaining option. A bench of Justices A.K. Jayasankaran Nambiar and C.S. Sudha observed that the SIT was under no obligation to compel anyone to give a statement, and directed that the nodal agency set up to receive complaints from the film industry must continue to function.

The wider count is larger and worth keeping straight. A total of 120 FIRs were registered. Thirty-five came from statements made to the Hema Committee. The other 85 came from allegations women made publicly after the report was released. Chargesheets were filed in 26 cases. Separate proceedings involving named figures including actor and MLA M. Mukesh, former AMMA general secretary Siddique, and actor Jayasurya continued on their own track, arising from complaints those women chose to press themselves.

So the headline is accurate but incomplete. The Hema Committee cases collapsed. The cases women filed on their own initiative, after the report gave them cover, did not all collapse with them. That distinction matters, and it points at exactly what went wrong.

Six years is not a delay. It is a lesson the state taught them.

The committee was formed in July 2017, after a Malayalam actress was abducted and assaulted in a moving vehicle. It was chaired by retired Kerala High Court judge Justice K. Hema, with veteran actor Sharada and former bureaucrat K.B. Valsala Kumari. The women who came forward did so under an explicit promise of confidentiality, and that promise is the only reason many of them spoke at all.

The committee submitted its 296-page report in December 2019. The Kerala government did not release it. It sat for five years. A redacted version reached the public on 19 August 2024, and only after the State Information Commission ordered it and the High Court dismissed an appeal seeking to block it. Actor Parvathy Thiruvothu put the arithmetic plainly on Instagram, tagging the Chief Minister to ask what had happened to the policy reforms the committee was actually formed to produce, noting it had only been five and a half years.

Now run the sequence from a survivor's side of it. You give a statement in 2018 or 2019 on a promise of confidentiality. Nothing happens for five years. The report comes out redacted. The state then registers a criminal case in your name, on the basis of a statement you gave in confidence, and asks you to testify publicly against a man who is still working, still casting, still powerful, about an incident from the early 2000s for which almost no circumstantial evidence survives.

One investigator told South First that the women argued they had already given their statements six years ago and that circumstances had changed. Read that as cowardice if you want. It is not. It is a correct reading of the odds by people who were given five years to study them.

India does not have a law problem here. It has an employer problem.

This is the part that should be infuriating, because the remedy exists and has existed since 2013. The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, known as the POSH Act, covers temporary, contractual and daily wage workers, not just salaried employees.

In March 2022, a Kerala High Court division bench of Chief Justice S. Manikumar and Justice Shaji P. Chaly held it explicitly: the production unit of every film is an establishment employing actors, artists and other workers, and any such unit engaging more than ten workers is required to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee. The court extended the same obligation to FEFKA and the Kerala Film Chamber of Commerce, and asked the industry bodies to consider a joint committee. The Malayalam film Neelavelicham went on to constitute an IC on its set.

So why does almost nothing happen? Because a film set dissolves. The production unit that employed a junior artist in March does not exist in June. The ICC, if it was ever formed, dissolves with it. There is no continuing employer to complain to, no HR file, no personnel record, and frequently no written contract at all. The industry runs on informal agreements, and informality is not a neutral condition. It is the thing that makes accountability structurally impossible, and everyone senior enough to fix it benefits from it staying broken.

Karnataka showed how hard even the first step is. When the Karnataka Film Chamber of Commerce announced a POSH committee chaired by filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh, a fight broke out inside the chamber the same day and the body walked it back. Lankesh's question was the right one. What are they scared of.

Mumbai's version of the same story ended in a limitation clause

The north has its own closing argument. On 7 March 2025, Judicial Magistrate N.V. Bansal in Andheri dismissed Tanushree Dutta's plea challenging the relief granted to Nana Patekar, citing an expired limitation period for the alleged 2008 incident on the sets of Horn Ok Pleassss and a lack of evidence for the 2018 allegations. The Mumbai Police had filed a B-summary closure report in 2019. Dutta's protest petition ran for more than five years and ended on a clock.

Patekar's legal team welcomed the ruling as a reaffirmation of his innocence, which is their right, and the finding is what it is. But look at the mechanism rather than the merits. Dutta spoke in 2018 about 2008. The law said 2008 was too long ago. The reason it was too long ago is that in 2008 there was no route by which she could have said it and been taken seriously. The delay that killed the case was manufactured by the same silence the case was about.

What would have to change, and it is not

awareness

Awareness is done. India is aware. The 2018 wave made it aware, the Hema Committee made it undeniable, and the aggregators have made it a weekly ambient hum. What does not exist is a place to put a complaint that outlives the shoot.

The specific fixes are already on the record. The Hema Committee recommended a tribunal for industry disputes, exclusion of people accused of serious offences for a meaningful period, and controls on the fan clubs used to harass women who speak. The Kerala High Court has said production units must maintain ICs. A standing joint committee at the level of the industry body, not the production, is the structural answer, because the body persists after the set is struck. The Kerala High Court also noted its own directions would remain in force only until the government enacts new legislation, which is a quiet way of saying the legislation has not arrived.

Until it does, the honest position is this. Every time one of these clips lands, the correct response is not a comment. It is the question of which production it was, whether that production had a functioning Internal Complaints Committee, and if not, why the producer is not being asked about it by name. That is boring, and it is slow, and it is the only thing on this list that has ever produced a consequence.

Quick Facts

Committee: Justice K. Hema Committee, constituted July 2017 by the Kerala government

Members: Retired Justice K. Hema (chair), actor Sharada, former bureaucrat K.B. Valsala Kumari

Trigger: 2017 abduction and assault of a Malayalam actress

Report submitted: December 2019, 296 pages

Report released: 19 August 2024, redacted version

FIRs registered: 120 total, of which 35 arose from Hema Committee statements

Chargesheets filed: 26

Status: All 35 Hema Committee cases closed, June 2025, cited reason being complainant non-cooperation

Governing law: Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013

For readers outside India, the redacted Hema Committee report is a public document and the Kerala High Court proceedings are on the record, so the primary material is accessible from the US, UK, Canada and Australia without paywalled Indian media in between.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened to the Hema Committee cases?

All 35 cases registered on the basis of statements given to the Justice Hema Committee were closed in June 2025. The Special Investigation Team told the Kerala High Court that the complainants would not give statements to investigators, leaving no way to proceed. Separate cases filed independently by women after the report's release continued on their own track.

Why did the Hema Committee survivors refuse to testify?

The women gave statements to the committee in 2018 and 2019 under a promise of confidentiality, and the report was then withheld by the Kerala government for five years. By the time the SIT approached them, the incidents were up to two decades old, circumstantial evidence had largely disappeared, and the accused were still working in the industry. One investigator said complainants argued that circumstances had changed since they testified.

Does the POSH Act apply to film sets in India?

Yes. In March 2022 the Kerala High Court held that every film production unit is an establishment employing actors, artists and other workers, and that any unit engaging more than ten workers must constitute an Internal Complaints Committee under the POSH Act, 2013. The Act covers temporary, contractual and daily wage workers, not only salaried staff.

What did the Hema Committee report actually find?

The report documented the prevalence of the casting couch, control of the industry by a powerful male group, and working conditions on Kerala film sets that included a lack of toilets and changing rooms for women. It recorded that minors had also been harassed, and described a pervasive culture of silence enforced by the fear of losing work.

What was the verdict in the Tanushree Dutta case?

On 7 March 2025, Judicial Magistrate N.V. Bansal in Andheri, Mumbai dismissed Tanushree Dutta's plea challenging the relief granted to Nana Patekar, citing an expired limitation period for the alleged 2008 incident and a lack of evidence for the 2018 allegations. Mumbai Police had filed a B-summary closure report in 2019. Patekar's legal team said the ruling reaffirmed his innocence.

Is it worth sharing viral clips of alleged misconduct on film sets?

Sharing an unverified clip rarely produces any consequence and frequently harms the woman in the frame, who becomes permanently searchable in connection with an incident she never described publicly. The questions that have historically produced results are which production it was, whether that production maintained a functioning Internal Complaints Committee, and whether the producer has been asked to answer for it by name.