Mobasher Jawed Akbar (born 11 January 1951) is an Indian journalist and politician,[1] who served as the Minister of State (MoS) for External Affairs until 17 October 2018.

Akbar is a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha,[2] and was inducted into the Union Council of Ministers by PM Narendra Modi on 5 July 2016.

He was a Member of Parliament between 1989 and 1991, and returned to public life in March 2014 when he joined the BJP and was appointed national spokesperson during the 2014 general elections that brought the party back to office with a simple majority under the leadership of Narendra Modi.

Akbar has also authored fiction, such as Blood Brothers-A Family Saga (Fratelli Di Sangue, Italian translated version).

[citation needed] On 17 October 2018, Akbar resigned due to a number of sexual harassment allegations against him from numerous women who had worked with him over the years.

He would remain with the weekly until 1973 when he was named editor of the news fortnightly, Onlooker, owned by The Free Press Journal Group in Mumbai.

In 1976, he moved to Calcutta to join the Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) Group as editor of Sunday, a political weekly.

[12] In 1991, Akbar joined the Government as an adviser in the Ministry of Human Resources, and helped policy planning in key areas of education, the National Literacy Mission and in the protection of heritage.

In 2005, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia appointed him as a member of the committee to draft a ten-year charter for Muslim nations on behalf of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

During the late 1990s, he diluted his stake in the Asian Age, eventually selling off a major part of it to the owners of the Deccan Chronicle Group.

In March 2008, Akbar was removed from The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle due to differences with the owners over editorial policy, as some newspapers have reported it.

The controversy began when the journalist Priya Ramani writing an article at Vogue about sexual harassment in context of the 'Me Too' Movement in India.

[20][21][22] On 14 October 2018, he made an official statement saying that he found the allegations against him as "wild and baseless" and that he planned to take legal recourse against the women who accused him.

[3][27] In an op-ed in Washington Post on 2 November 2018,[28] Pallavi Gogoi, the chief business editor for NPR in the United States, wrote of her rape by Akbar 23 years ago in a hotel room in Jaipur.

On 11 August 2021 the Delhi High Court issued a notice to journalist Priya Ramani based on the plea filed by MJ Akbar.