Crimes ‘unfit’ for TV

Here’s an admission I don’t like to make too often — there are some stories that TV can’t do. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been pursuing this story that involves sexual harassment, courts and lawyers and at the end of this period, that’s the frustrating conclusion I am left with. It all started off with an inside page story that many of you may have read in your newspapers on September 9 — ‘Women lawyers move Supreme Court to end harassment in courts’.

Having covered the high court for some time as a newspaper reporter, I was intrigued by the story but left highly dissatisfied because there seemed to be no details about why this group of female lawyers had suddenly decided to seek legal action against sexual harassment. On the court beat, I had heard about how junior female lawyers were exploited, so I wanted to know what finally got them to stand up against it. But obviously, the courts are nothing if not secretive, so even a copy of the petition was hard to come by. Here’s what I found out:

What pushed the women over the edge was an incident at the Delhi high court this May. There was an evidence hearing at the joint registrar’s court where a male lawyer was arguing with a female lawyer. They were both in their mid-30s and apparently their aggression levels went a tad overboard, and the man brushed against her chest. He said it was by mistake as they were fighting over some documents, but the woman was furious.

“How dare you?” she demanded, at which point he apparently retorted by saying: “I can do it again.” He followed that up by demonstrating his words — reaching out in the court office and touching her breast in front of an audience of 30-odd lawyers. The lady lawyer, feeling outraged, slapped him. The male lawyer slapped her back. It was at this point that the joint registrar finally woke up and told them both to keep it down and took them to his chamber. That’s where the woman lawyer, who was accompanied by her senior and her husband, also a lawyer, broke down. The matter was reported to the acting Chief Justice AK Sikri who organised a hearing. The male lawyer is reported to have proudly accepted that he had indeed done what he was accused of. His punishment — seven days jail and barred from entering court for a few months, but no one could confirm that the punishment was carried out. It seems as he was from Bihar, other lawyers from there made it a regional issue. While Justice Sikri’s order read: “Whatever has happened is inappropriate and that’s the reason we can’t record it.”

Now the male lawyer’s wife has filed a special leave petition in the Supreme Court against the order, and that’s when a group of women lawyers decided enough was enough. If the Supreme Court was progressive enough years ago in its landmark Vishaka judgment to order setting up of sexual harassment panels in every organisation, why didn’t the courts themselves have any mechanism? If these educated, women of law couldn’t stop a man from molesting them in courtrooms, how could other women have a hope in hell?

Maybe, they don’t. At least, it doesn’t seem so when you hear how they treated another, recent complaint at the Bar Council. A young female lawyer found herself at the receiving end of some unwarranted attention. He asked her to marry him, which she dismissed as a joke. When he followed it up with love letters and text messages that said, “I am standing outside your house, I like your lawn”, she knew that he’d crossed over to a stalker. When he sent her a message that said,”I want to play with your blood”, she realized she had to report him before it was too late. But how was she to complain? Apparently, it took a lot of persuasion on her part to get a senior colleague to accompany and substantiate her complaint. When she approached the Council, they looked helpless and expressed inability to help. When she persisted, the Council organised a ‘hearing’ which basically meant they made her come face-to-face with her harasser. “Madam, we have discussed. Ab theek hai na?” And that was their contribution. The female lawyer realized she had to take the matter into her own hands. “I told that man I was going to get him debarred and was going to file a criminal suit against him.” Fortunately for her, it seemed to work.

But others aren’t fortunate. Conversations with women lawyers reveal how deep-rooted the problem is. Senior advocate Kamini Jaiswal told me several instances where no action was taken despite complaints. “The junior lawyer who comes to a senior’s chamber is very vulnerable,” said Jaiswal, “She is very young and it is difficult for her to even raise her voice. If she complains against a respected, senior lawyer, who will believe her? Her entire career is at stake.” Jaiswal, who was the only lawyer who didn’t mind being quoted, told me how judges were inaccessible for junior lawyers, especially because they were friendly with the senior ones. Do all women lawyers go through this, I asked. “Many of them do,” she said.

It’s interesting that this was happening around the same time the Sexual Harassment Bill was being passed in Parliament without any debate. If our MPs knew this, would they have allowed the clause, which imposes a fine on women whose complaints are found false? Would women like these lawyers file complaints against their tormentors using this law knowing the odds are heavily stacked against them? I wish we’d talk about these things more, I wish the Chief Justice would clearly write what happened in the registrar’s room instead of making it an unmentionable, I wish I could do the story for TV so that more people would realise how this law is totally ineffective. But till my wishes come true, this column will have to do.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News

On Twitter: @sunetrac