Piyasree Dasgupta - St Stephen's shame: Victim's FIR reveals true horror of sexual harassment
Thampu would have done a favour to the idea of a truly liberal educational institute had he backed the victim in her fight against harassment. Instead now he looks like a principal for whom the institution's reputation came first, way ahead of the victim's plight.
How has India taught you to respond to sexual violence? With
outrage? Not really. With fear? Somewhat, yes. With shame? Most
definitely. No one should know that your breasts have been groped by
random strangers in public spaces or by men you know in professional spaces. No
one should know if your butt has been pinched, your body rubbed against or
touched in ways that made you want to puke. In popular understanding of sexual
violence, it is your body's shame first. So the first response to it should be
denial and silence. Till the trauma just spills over. The Delhi University PhD
student, who has accused a St Stephen's College assistant professor of sexual
harassment, followed this widely endorsed though unwritten rulebook of
responding to sexual violence in India.
So it took her over three years to to take resolute steps in
acting against the supervisor, who she alleges began harassing her in 2012.
Firstpost now has a copy of her FIR, where she details how Satish Kumar,
the chemistry professor she was working under, had taken complete advantage of
his position of superiority and subjected her to sexually coloured remarks
relentlessly and then taken to touching her inappropriately. She writes in her
FIR that on October 15, 2013, Satish Kumar had 'sexually assaulted her'.
"On that day, he pulled me toward himself, he puts his hands on my breasts
and he completely grabbed me and he put his hands on my private parts,"
the complainant writes in the FIR.
And that was the culmination - for want of a better word -
of a year-long, systematic process of verbal and physical sexual harassment. The complainant recounts in her FIR how Kumar had tried to
hug her (apparently, a creating a new compound in the lab would make him want
to hug her), touch her breasts several times and even touch her thighs. On one
occasion her had asked her if she had a 'thigh gap'. "It's good to have
gap in women's thighs and you have gap in your thighs..." the FIR quotes
him as saying.
He showed her pictures of naked women on the pretext of
showing her software he had downloaded for work, he talked about videos women
shoot with their boyfriends and most of his conversations were sexually
coloured. On the other hand, he also made sure that his sexual overtures would
go unreported thanks to the victim's fear of endangering her thesis.
So he covertly kept recounting anecdotes about the
importance of a supervisor in a PhD student's life. From suggesting that
students who speak up against their guides never get other professors to guide
them to saying that it is necessary to get a supervisor's recommendation while
applying for jobs, Kumar intimidated and blackmailed the student into silence
by suggesting that everything she cared fiercely about - higher education, a
job, the magic letters of a Ph.D - depended on his whims.
These are all allegations in the FIR. And Kumar will get to
tell his side of the story. But the question is what could allowed and empower
someone to harass his student with such brazen impunity?
Firstly, it's the absence of a culture of reporting sexual
harassment. As we mentioned above, abusers are sharply aware of of the burden
of shame that that a victim of harassment carries. And from past instances, the
likes of Kumar, know that most victims prefer to lug the shame around instead
of dealing with the additional discomfort of moral scrutiny and character
assassination.
Then again, forget a culture of reporting, we are not even
sure about the right way to hold a conversation around sexual violence
especially in professional and private spaces. For example, imagine walking up
to the principal of your college and saying that a professor asked you if
you have a gap between your thighs. Chances are victims feel embarrassed to go
into the grimy details of such incidents, wondering how it would reflect upon
themselves.
That apart, the St Stephen's incident is complicated by class.
The victim mentions in the FIR that she hails from a 'humble' family from
Teekhi village in Gurgaon, Haryana. She definitely doesn't fit the profile of
the upper middle class and affluent students who study in the college. In fact,
the college's principal, seemed to emphasize the fact that the victim was a
registered research student of Delhi University and not really a student of St.
Stephen's college in his NDTV oped too. It makes you wonder what would
have happened if her father had come from an economic class which gave him the
confidence to demand justice instead of pleading with "folded hands"
to save his daughter's future?
The op-ed which says "facts do not lie" leave
other questions unanswered. Thampu writes he had no authority over the student
since she was not a student of his college. But of course Kumar was a professor
in his college. Did Thampu take up the complaint with Kumar separately? Did he,
even for the purpose of verification, ask Kumar what made a woman student level
such allegations against him? Did he warn Kumar against doing anything that
would make the student uncomfortable? By his own admission, he didn't. He says
he asked her to file a complaint with the Internal Complaints Committee and
called a meeting with both the complainant and her advisor and in that meeting
she does not "utter a word about sexual harassment".
In fact, his NDTV oped
is entirely devoted to countering the victim's FIR, though he doesn't deny that
she may have been sexually harassed. Dr. Thampu lashes out instead at wolves in
sheep's clothing and those who seek "sadistic media limelight" at the
expense of the college.
The St Stephen's case reiterates the idea that in spaces
with a hallowed reputation, victims of sexual violence are further burdened
with the responsibility of not tarnishing the reputation of the institution.
That, in turn, allows sexual predators to behave with the kind of impunity that
Kumar allegedly did.
The pattern is the same - from the Tehelka sexual
violence case to the Greenpeace sexual harassment case. The accused in all
these cases are alleged to have invoked their positions and their
organisation's larger-than-life reputation - directly or as insinuation - to
send the victims scrambling for support elsewhere.
Thampu did what Tehelka and then Greenpeace did. He hoped
that this too shall pass, that this too could be managed without raising a
stink because the victim, humbled by the mighty reputation of the institution
she was up against would eventually give up. She had already shown enough
signs of being anxious about the repercussions on her career and the
institution looks like it took full advantage of it to hush up the case.
Dr. Thampu - the head of one of the country's most coveted
educational institute - did nothing to allay her or her family's fears that
filing a case of sexual harassment would tarnish the victim's reputation first.
Thampu recalls meeting her father, "With folded hands, the father
pleads with the Principal not to turn this into a complaint of sexual
harassment as it could result in a scandal and also affect his daughter's
chance of getting a Ph.D."
Instead of assuaging the man's desperation, Thampu now
stands accused of having used it to protect the reputation of his institution.
Whether he followed the rulebook to the barest minimum or not, Thampu would
have done a favour to the idea of a truly liberal educational institute had he
backed the victim in her fight against harassment. Instead now he looks like a
principal for whom the institution's reputation came first, way ahead of the
victim's plight.
