Chief Justice India D.Y. Chandrachud has sought a report from the Allahabad High Court after a woman judge from Uttar Pradesh wrote an open letter to him, saying she has suffered the “personal humiliation” of being denied a fair hearing on her complaint of sexual harassment at workplace and has lost her will to live.
The woman judge said she was sexually harassed by a district judge and his associates.
She said, in the letter circulated on social media, that she had complained to the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court and Administrative Judge, but to no avail. The Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) of the High Court took six months and “a thousand emails” to even start an enquiry into her complaint filed in July.
The woman judge called the enquiry “a farce and a sham” in which the witnesses were the subordinates of the district judge in question. Her plea to the ICC to transfer the district judge during the pendency of the enquiry was not allowed. She said the High Court, on the judicial side, had already given a finding that the evidence in the case was tampered with.
She said the Supreme Court at least should have heard her case. However, the apex court dismissed her case in “eight seconds”.
The case had come up before a Bench of Justices Hrishikesh Roy and Sandeep Mehta on December 13. The Bench had dismissed her petition, observing in its order that the ICC was “already in seisin of the case and a resolution is already passed which is pending approval of the Chief Justice of the Allahabad High Court”.
“I felt like my life, my dignity and my soul have been DISMISSED. It felt like a personal humiliation,” the open letter read.
“The enquiry will now be conducted with the district judge in control of all the witnesses. We all know the fate of such an enquiry. What justice will I give to others when I am myself hopeless? I have no will to live anymore. I have been rendered into a walking corpse in the last year-and-half,” the letter said.
