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Bajrangi Bhaijaan director Kabir Khan said that Bollywood is responsible for creating a culture of harassment by shielding the alleged perpetrators during a panel on India's #MeToo movement at the Mumbai film fest .

His comments come in the wake of several close colleagues' sexual misconduct coming to light in recent days. Kabir recently dropped Vikas Bahl's name from his upcoming project 83 after he was accused of sexual harassment by a former employee of his company Phantom Films. His casting director for the project Mukesh Chabbra has also been accused of sexual harassment. Moreover, Kabir was represented by Kwan’s Anirban Blah, who is facing multiple sexual harassment allegations.

At the session titled ‘MeToo at MAMI’, Kabir Khan shared his views about Bollywood's complicity in the harassment crimes taking place for decades.

“In a certain sense, honestly, we all have been complicit. I have seen people all around me fall left right and centre. These are people I’ve worked with, represented me, people who were doing for casting me, they were my actors. There were hushed whispers about most of them.

“There was a general consensus that most of the people whose names have come up are people who we seemed to have known about, but we all did keep quiet,” Kabir said.

The director added during his six-year-old association with Yash Raj Films, he had heard about “one person” but he, along with others, ignored it.

“I came here 10-12 years ago as a documentary filmmaker. I got into the system. I was with Yash Raj Films for six years. There would be so many occasions where one would hear about a certain behaviour from this person. But we all in a certain way ignored,” Kabir Khan said.

The director said that after the #MeToo movement people will no longer ignore even the hushed whispers about a harasser.

“The biggest change coming out because of MeToo movement is that we aren’t going to do that anymore. The moment I hear even a murmur that something like this (happened), I am going to come down like a ton of bricks. I didn’t earlier."

Kabir also maintains that harassment does not take place on his sets and talked about an exception:

“On my last web series, one of my ADs did come to me just last week. She was with us for a very brief while, one international schedule, and she told me about two incidents when she felt uncomfortable.

“I told her she should’ve told me. We are very accessible, but she said she thought I would be busy, and this happened on the last day. Fortunately, they were not very serious in nature. But apart from those two incidents, it hasn’t really happened on my set,” he said.

Kabir was also asked if he believes his association with Salman Khan, who has been accused by a female actor of harassment, would be viewed problematic today in the post-MeToo era. The director said he would not go into individual cases because he didn’t know the details.