TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual Assault, Online Sexual Harassment, Explicit Language.
On July 24, 2016, a student from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, wrote on Facebook about her experience of sexual assault. “I was molested by Ekalavya Chaudhuri on four different occasions,” she said, accusing her classmate from Jadavpur University’s Department of English (JUDE).
The four incidents had taken place over a year ago, between May and August 2015. On August 24, The Student brought them to the attention of her department professors, who reprimanded Chaudhuri and let him off with a warning. At the time, The Student chose not to file an official complaint.
Chaudhuri was a popular figure at JUDE. He routinely topped exams and was known for being a proficient debater, actor, writer and performer. He was a regular in Kolkata’s slam-poetry and theatre circles. His profile on Ask.fm, a question-and-answer-based social networking platform, is full of messages from anonymous admirers. One of them wrote, “From the first time I came across you… I have been in absolute awe. You are a person who has inspired me tremendously.”
Chaudhuri is also the son of Chandreyee Niyogi, a highly-regarded professor of English and Women’s Studies at Jadavpur University. “You can see my reasons for not wanting to file an official complaint,” The Student later told me. “I was worried about pissing off the wrong people.”
A month later, in September 2015, a girl from Loreto College, Kolkata, contacted some of Chaudhuri’s classmates. She provided them with screenshots of a WhatsApp conversation with Chaudhuri, in which he repeatedly made graphic sexual remarks despite her refusal to engage.
Chaudhuri’s classmates were livid. They ambushed him one day after class and forced him to sign an informal statement, which said, “The class requests and recommends that the concerned individual seek counselling focusing on the concepts of consent and personal space.”
The Student alleges that, in the following months, Chaudhuri’s behaviour toward her became increasingly passive aggressive. “He stopped all the touching, but found other ways to harass me. He would glare at me across classrooms, especially on days when we had exams or class presentations,” she said. The Student also alleged that a friend of Chaudhuri’s – Janhabi Mukherjee of Presidency College had been bullying her online. Months later, at her wit’s end, she decided to air her grievances on Facebook.
The Student’s disclosure sparked an online reckoning. Before the day was up, 20-year-old Chaudhuri had been accused of sexual harassment by at least 17 more women. Screenshots of messages he’d allegedly sent to some of them began circulating widely on social media — over 40,000 people were ‘talking about this’ on Facebook.
Other allegations of assault emerged. One girl wrote on Facebook that Chaudhuri had pinned her down and tried to strip her while she “protested violently and vehemently.” Another said she was molested in his bedroom when she went over to borrow books. Two women, I spoke to also claim he sent them “unsolicited pictures of a sexual nature”.
A day after The Student’s Facebook post, 13 women from various colleges in Kolkata wrote a joint statement in which they said, “Ekalavya Chaudhuri, you are a molester. A sex offender. A sexual predator.”
On July 26, 2016, The Student and two others from Jadavpur University lodged official complaints with the Registrar. On July 27th, Chaudhuri was indefinitely suspended pending an official inquiry.
According to law, the inquiry should not have taken more than 90 days. However, by the time the case could reach any sort of conclusion, Chaudhuri had already graduated, rendering him immune to punitive action. He is currently pursuing a Masters in English Literature from Presidency University, another reputed Kolkata institution.
II
Multiple students spoke of a ‘whisper network’ in which Chaudhuri’s behaviour towards women was widely discussed. One girl explained to me, “Women had always known about him because he affected them directly.” Another said she knew Chaudhuri “because he had sent creepy messages that he termed as ‘flirtation’ to almost all women in my batch in school.”
According to Chaudhuri himself, “this whole thing is a deliberate and targeted conspiracy against me and my mother.”
About the screenshots, Chaudhuri says, “It is certainly the case that I have had conversations of a sexual nature with people online. These conversations have been graphic and sexual, but always reciprocal (sic). The screenshots uploaded had responses deleted, strategic cropping, distortions and misrepresentations, making them appear very different from how the conversations really ran… The entirety of those existing conversations will tell a very different story.”
Chaudhuri was unwilling to share screenshots of how the conversations really ran.
III
The allegations against Chaudhuri should have been an important moment in the fight for gender parity in Indian universities. They came two years after the Hokkolorob protests, which began in response to an incident of sexual violence at Jadavpur University in 2014, and was the first student agitation against sexual harassment in India.
In the interim years, the University Grants Commission prepared a document titled ‘The Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal of Sexual Harassment of Women Employees and Students in Higher Educational Institutions’, which prescribes a standard protocol for all HEIs while dealing with sexual harassment complaints. The document also brings students within the ambit of The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, which until then only protected staff members.
According to these new rules, all Universities were required to form an Internal Complaints Committee to oversee complaints of sexual harassment by July 2. When the complaints against Chaudhuri were filed on July 26, more than two weeks past the deadline, Jadavpur University had not yet formed one.
Instead, protesting students demanded that an independent Fact Finding Committee (FFC) be formed to investigate. Rather than follow available — and mandatory — procedures, Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das agreed to this arbitrary demand. He nominated a group of seven students and professors to conduct an inquiry, and gave them 90 days to file a report. They filed one in two weeks.
According to one student, “The FFC’s report is tone deaf and shows no sign of institutional responsibility.”
The report stated that there was prima facie evidence of sexual harassment, but also dismisses the complaints on various technical grounds. It acknowledges the explicit language used by Chaudhuri online, but absolves him of any punitive action, even suggesting that one must consider the harassment faced by Chaudhuri himself in light of these accusations.
The report, by way of conclusion, suggested that the matter be looked at by a “competent authority.”
IV
On September 1, 2016, once again flouting UGC protocol, Das wrote to The Women’s Commission of West Bengal asking them to intervene in the matter. Sunanda Mukherjee, Chairperson of the Women’s Commission, met with two of the complainants soon after. “She said she would look into the case and suggest a way forward for the University and promised to reply to the Vice-Chancellor within seven days,” The Student told me.
Despite several reminders, Mukherjee’s reply never came. She did, however, continue to promise the complainants swift action and assistance. Meanwhile, Das refused to proceed with the investigation until the Commission had taken stock of the situation.
Mukherjee’s response finally arrived in March 2017, a whole seven months later, and left students shocked. The Commission had withdrawn its support from the case. “I told Das that the college was equipped to handle things on its own,” Mukherjee told me, sliding over a copy of the UGC’s notification of May 2, 2016.
She was unable to provide any explanation for the prolonged delay.
Mukherjee, by her own admission, is an old acquaintance of veteran Bengali journalist Sumit Chaudhuri, Ekalavya’s father. Other sources at the Commission reveal that both Chaudhuri’s parents visited Mukherjee separately on two occasions to discuss the allegations against their son.
Despite this conflict of interest, Mukherjee did not recuse herself from the case.
Chaudhuri continued to remain absent from classes during this period, which many students believe was a strategic move by the University. “They sent him on a long, university-sanctioned vacation in order to keep him away from the public eye”, The Student alleged.
Despite being suspended, Chaudhuri was allowed to appear for exams. After his classmates threatened to boycott them, arrangements were made to let Chaudhuri take the exams in his mother’s cabin, out of sight from his peers.
V
Following a student protest on April 4, 2017, an ICC was constituted at Jadavpur University in accordance with UGC rules. On August 4, 2017, the ICC submitted a 73-page report of the Chaudhuri case, of which half a page is dedicated to remedial measures.
The ICC report, like the FFC’s before it, was inconclusive. It did not punish or absolve Chaudhuri, and simply reiterated the UGC’s guidelines in recommending that Jadavpur University should “take measures to improve gender sensitisation”.
The report also said that “the University Authority may consider taking expert advice from competent authority ” about how to proceed with the inquiry, a statement which undermines its own role and legal responsibility. Bizarrely, it even recommended that “students should sign an affidavit regarding sexual harassment during admission”.
Two of the complainants allege that they were victim-shamed during their depositions by Sarbani Goswami and Anindita Banerjee Tamta, members of the ICC. The third complainant did not participate in the investigation and did not wish to provide an official comment for this story.
Chaudhuri had, by now, appeared for his final, third-year examinations (which he topped). His mark sheets were held by the University to appease protesting students who were unhappy with the ICC’s investigation but were returned after he sought them out via court order in September 2017.
“The ICC called me and gave me definite assurance that I have been exonerated and that there is no investigation pending against me,” Chaudhuri claims. However, the ICC has not issued any official statement to this effect.
The Student submitted an appeal against the ICC’s report in October 2017, which she alleges has been ignored by the Vice-Chancellor and the ICC.
On December 24, 2017, Chaudhuri’s class wore black ribbons to their convocation ceremony, where Chaudhuri was awarded a medal for his outstanding academic performance. Frustrated, The Student took to the stage to voice her trauma, only to be berated publicly by the Vice-Chancellor, who claimed she was depicting the college in a ‘negative light’. “This incident left me traumatised,” The Student said. “I was shaking when I got down from the stage. I shook that entire day.”
The Student is currently pursuing her post-graduate studies at Jadavpur University, where Chaudhuri’s name is still feverishly discussed among students and faculty members. “As long as I am here, I will make sure people are talking about him,” she says.
But The Student’s determination has taken its toll, requiring her to seek help from multiple mental-health professionals. She had been taking medications for anxiety since January 2016 and had to increase her dosage after the convocation incident. “There was no communication from the ICC about any post-assault trauma I might have faced,” she says. As per the law, Committees are required to provide the option of counselling to complainants.
There is a strong sense of frustration and anger in The Student’s voice, not just at Chaudhuri, but also at the slow, lumbering wheels of due process.
VI
Chaudhuri’s case is just one of many that are mismanaged by the very systems meant to see them through to justice. Despite being mandatory, ICCs remain dormant in Universities across the country, and the active ones are hardly sensitive to the plight of survivors.
Too often, Universities prefer to exploit procedural loopholes in order to sweep these cases under the rug, instead of investigating them in a manner that befits the complicated nature of sexual harassment. Official protocols lack empathy, and fail to recognise that victims have more to lose in reporting harassment than those accused of it. This is especially true when the accused is a professor or popular student.
Recent incidents at Jadavpur University, Jindal Law School, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banaras Hindu University and Daulat Ram College are all testament to the nature and extent of the problem.
Compare this with Cambridge University, which recently admitted to receiving 173 complaints of harassment in nine months via an anonymous system. Further west, Columbia University is taking active measures to understand the structural nature of gender-violence on campus. It’s obvious we have a lot of catching up to do here at home.
One way of dealing with this poor state of affairs in the meanwhile lies in unconventional methods of resistance, like the List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (#LoSHA), crowd-sourced, verified and published in October 2017 by 24-year-old student lawyer and activist, Raya Sarkar.
‘The List’, borne out of apathy with the status quo, accuses more than 60 Indian academics of sexual harassment, based on claims by students whose identities have been protected. LoSHA sends a pretty clear message: the problem is more endemic than we think. It is less of a kangaroo court than a warning light; a signal fire to the machinations of due process that it is about time they catch up.
A dozen professors mentioned featured in #LoSHA belong to Jadavpur University, more than any other in the country. No action has been initiated against any of them by the new ICC.
The author is a city reporter who covers Gurugram for Hindustan Times. You can follow him on Twitter @analog_glory.
The post was originally published on the author’s Medium account.
_
Image source for silhouette: Oman Muscat/Flickr
The post How A Student At Jadavpur Uni. Got Away After Sexually Harassing More Than A Dozen Women appeared first and originally on Youth Ki Awaaz and is a copyright of the same. Please do not republish.