Maharashtra Human Rights panel orders relief for two women professors over sexual harassment complaint

The petitioner had challenged MU’s July 5 circular declaring results of exams, which were scheduled in the first half of 2020 but could not be conducted due to “unprecedented pandemic and nationwide lockdown, through assignment-based evaluation. (File Photo)

The State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) in Maharashtra has recommended that two women allegedly sexually harassed by a man who was the principal of two colleges in Mumbai over the last two decades should be paid a compensation of Rs 5 lakh each by the police for not taking their complaints seriously.

The SHRC has also asked Mumbai University (MU) to consider action against the two colleges for discouraging the women from complaining. The man, who was arrested in January and February 2020 on separate complaints by the two women, had died last September.

In one of the cases, it took over 100 complaints over several years, and the intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), for the police to register a complaint after more than a decade of the incident taking place. In the other, the National Commission for Women (NCW) had to step in to help the complainant.

The recommendations of SHRC are non-binding. This was the last order by the former head of the commission, judge M A Sayeed, before he retired on April 27, 2021. But due to delays caused by the lockdown, it was issued only on May 31.

The first complaint was by a professor at a college where the man had joined as principal. She had been working at the college since 1992. The man, who joined as principal in 2003, allegedly began harassing her from 2004, showing her lewd photographs, sending her messages asking her to meet him and telling her that he would treat her as his “girlfriend” and that her career would take off.

The SHRC investigation found that when the woman complained to the college management in December 2004, she was told that her action against him “would not be tolerated”. Three years later, in December 2007, after she approached the Tilak Nagar police station to file a complaint, the college sacked her. The police also did not file a complaint.

The principal had to step down in January 2008. Thereafter, he changed a couple of jobs, before joining another well-known college as principal.

It was at this time, in October 2016, that the second complainant, a psychologist, encountered him during a conference at the college. The SHRC investigation concluded that he made “unhealthy advances and implied his real intentions”, and also sent the psychologist WhatsApp messages the same night.

After her complaint to the college authorities fell on deaf ears, and failing to get a complaint registered by the police, the woman wrote to several agencies, including the NCW.

The NCW forwarded her complaint to the Mumbai Police commissioner, following which an FIR was registered by Juhu police. The principal was arrested on February 15.

A month earlier, on January 17, the man had been arrested on the teacher’s complaint. In that case, the woman, a highly-qualified academic, finally wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September 2017, after her efforts of a decade to report the alleged offender with two MU vice-chancellors, a governor and officials of the higher education department proved futile.