India’s own MeToo movement has hit the police force with a Facebook post by a woman officer going viral on social media platforms. This was after a woman police officer, Leena Doley, accused her senior Mukesh Agrawal, an IPS officer, of sexually harassing her in the past.
Doley’s Facebook post has now gone viral. In her post, she described herself as a ‘survivor of sexual harassment at the workplace.’ She said that Agrawal, ADGP (Law and Order), had once offered to her on a holiday.
“I of course refused and took to the natural course of justice. I had no intention of taking a holiday with my boss. And I said so. To my organisation boss – the DGP, Assam. Anyway, a lot transpired after that – my written complaint against Mukesh Agrawal, IPS, IGP (L), Assam, now ADGP (L&O), Assam, Guwahati.”
She continued, “To cut a long story short, my husband committed suicide after around six months of my submitting my complaint against Mukesh Agrawal. Following which, the Enquiry Officer, Ms. Emily Choudhury, IAS, the then Addl. Chief Secretary, Assam, came to my house on the first day itself, the soonest possible, to assure me that it was not because of the complaint that my husband killed himself. I didn’t react. I was beyond any reaction. But the enquiry procedures had not started till then.”
Doley wrote that her case was dismissed even though Agrawal had allegedly confessed to offering to taker on a holiday. “The perpetrator had asked me to accompany him to a holiday destination without of course telling my husband. Also, the wife of the perpetrator had filed a defamation case against me for supposedly defaming her husband. I filed a revision petition against it in the Guwahati High Court. I won the case in the High Court,” she wrote.
Doley said that the justice had continued to elude her despite her written complaint.
She added, “The personal loss of my husband committing suicide is on a different ground. But I lost. My case and my husband and the father of my then 2 year old and six year old children. And that is what I remember. That the Enquiry Committee concluded that it was a misunderstanding even when the perpetrator himself admitted to the fact of the allegation made by me.”
She said that her case was an example that no woman government employee will ever muster courage to raise their voice against sexual harassment in future. “I’m an example. Of defeat,” she wrote.