Guwahati: A senior Assam police official is the latest to be caught in the ongoing #MeToo storm after he was accused of sexually harassing his junior colleague.
Majuli (HQ) Additional Superintendent of Police Leena Doley has charged Additional Director General (Law and Order) Mukesh Agarwal with sexual misconduct six years back. Agarwal could not be contacted for his reaction.
"I am a survivor of sexual harassment at the workplace. In the March of 2012, one of my seniors, Mukesh Agrawal, IPS, then IGP (Logistics), offered to take me on a holiday with him for the efficient work I had done," Doley wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday.
The police officer said she had refused and informed the DGP about it. "Anyway, a lot transpired after that - my written complaint against Mukesh Agrawal, IPS, IGP (L), Assam, now ADGP (L&O), Assam, Guwahati," she said.
Doley's husband had committed suicide around six months after the complaint was lodged. "Following which, the Inquiry Officer, Ms. Emily Choudhury, IAS, the then Addl. Chief Secretary, Assam, came to my house... to assure me that it was not because of the complaint that my husband killed himself," she added.
Doley wrote that she did not react as "I was beyond any reaction. But the inquiry procedures had not started till then. My case was dismissed as one of misunderstanding although the perpetrator had admitted to the fact".
The perpetrator had asked "me to accompany him to a holiday destination without of course telling my husband. Also, the wife of the perpetrator filed a defamation case against me for supposedly defaming her husband".
Doley eventually filed a revision petition against it in the Gauhati High Court and won the case. "I am now beyond any redemption. I only feel some kind of contentment that the case against me resulted in a judgement that complainants cannot be persecuted upon for filing a case against sexual predators," she said.
Doley, a mother of two, however, rued that she had received no justice for the complaint she had filed. "The personal loss of my husband committing suicide is on a different ground. But I lost.... The Inquiry Committee concluded that it was a misunderstanding even when the perpetrator himself admitted to the fact of the allegation made by me," she added.
The police officer lamented that after her experience, "no one else would come out with their stories in government departments. I'm an example. Of defeat. But still, for all of us, who have stood against it, strength to us!! #MeToo".
She said it was her duty to inform everyone of the fact that "as per the Gauhati High Court judgement (in the case), defamation cases against complainants cannot be filed during pendency of the allegation".
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