Dates and deadlines must seem like a joke to Arpita (name changed). One after another had passed her by, without delivering on the promises that were made to her. In April, a year had passed since she was physically and sexually harassed, allegedly by an official in the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute where she had studied and later worked. In May, a year had gone by since she lodged her complaint with the institute’s Internal [Complaints] Committee (IC). In June, the institute missed the deadline given by the court to complete the probe.
In all this time, there has been no real action against the official — except allowing him to work from home while continuing to draw his regular salary. Earlier this month, he was even allowed to work from campus for a day. Students protested the unannounced move, gheraoed the Vice Chancellor (VC)’s office, until the order letting him into the campus was revoked.
Arpita, meanwhile, is still waiting for the IC’s final report, nearly a year after the preliminary findings were submitted to the authorities.
Sadly, Arpita’s is far from a one-off incident. Across campuses and workplaces, complainants of sexual harassment routinely face lackadaisical, if not openly hostile, institutional responses.
The IC — created under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, commonly known as the POSH Act — is purposed with delivering accessible and timely justice to women. A panel containing four members, including an external member, and led by a woman presiding officer, is constituted to hear out any complaints of harassment by a student or employee of the organisation.
Ten years after the law came into effect, the Supreme Court flagged “serious lapses” and “uncertainty” in its implementation. According to the law, any organisation with 10 or more employees must have an IC.
The system can be an alternative for those who may not wish to approach the police, allowing grievances to be addressed internally. The IC is expected to hear both complainant and respondent fairly and complete its inquiry within 90 days. It may also recommend police action if necessary.
But the deadline is not mandatory, and this oversight in the law is often exploited. The time across which an institute leaves a complainant hanging on the case, long after she may have graduated or left the institute, inadvertently becomes another form of harassment.
The SRFTI has by now been tainted multiple times over its handling of sexual harassment complaints. In 2015, a former student had exposed the harassment faced by her and other female students of the campus, forcing the institute to ask two professors to retire. Nearly a decade later, however, those professors issued fresh legal notices to the survivors, challenging the findings of the IC.
This was around the same time Arpita’s own case was being delayed.
In her case, the preliminary report was submitted by the end of October 2024. Yet the final report has been held up without explanation. Only after media reports did the institute’s chairperson — actor and BJP parliamentarian Suresh Gopi — finally sign the chargesheet, after delaying it for months on end. The second round of inquiry could begin only after his approval.
The institute’s continual disregard for the survivors appear to be in direct contrast towards its treatment of the accused or guilty faculty.
Patriarchal mindset
“It shows a patriarchal mindset, this hostility shown towards women who approach the IC with complaints of sexual harassment,” says Swapna Gopinath, Professor of Film and Cultural Studies at Symbiosis, Pune. Swapna previously worked at the SN College in Thiruvananthapuram, where a complaint lodged by several female students against a professor failed to elicit punitive measures against the accused, but instead unleashed a plethora of verbal shaming directed at the survivors.
The accused professor was not suspended even for a day, while five professors who supported the students faced transfers or suspension.
“The college did constitute an IC [for this complaint] and conducted hearings multiple times, and found him not guilty of the offences,” Swapna says.
The students had presented substantial evidence during the hearings — including screenshots of messages they found inappropriate, proof of missed video calls at late hours, and so on. “But from the beginning they were trying to dismiss it all as nothing big. They seemed to think that anything other than outright sexual assault did not really merit an IC case,” Swapna says, adding that there was also no attempt made to consult an expert on cyber crimes.
The IC, Swapna says, is a great tool, and if properly used, has many possibilities to be supportive to women. She too has been an IC member before. “It is all clearly stated, what constitutes harassment, what are the steps to take in each of those situations. But it is important to have members without a patriarchal mindset in the panel. The members of an IC should get awareness training.”
In fact, it was during an awareness class led by Swapna that the complainant students realised the possibilities of the IC and that they could take their issues to the committee.
One should count it as progress, Swapna concedes, that we now have an IC in place for aggrieved women to approach. “Earlier, there were half-baked systems in place, like a women’s cell at the university and college level, where the events organised were as random as sewing sessions and baking sessions!” Swapna says.
IC, an effective mechanism in wrong hands
Feminist lawyer J Sandhya says the IC itself is a very effective mechanism that has prompted more and more women to come forward with their issues. Often, however, certain members of the panel or the institute exert pressure on the others to make a decision in favour of the respondent (the person facing the allegation).
“Often, members of the IC do not receive adequate training and have little idea about the process, even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly stressed on the importance of capacity building. In a patriarchy-driven society, this is especially important to affect any real change in the mindset. There has to be a certain sensitivity and woman-oriented thinking among the members of the panel,” Sandhya says.
Having served on several ICs and made many interventions, Sandhya has come across panels unfamiliar with their mandate or the proper way to record evidence. When such a flimsy report goes to court, it gets brushed off, so it is very important to follow proper documentation, she says.
“I have known cases where witness statements were taken over the phone. As part of Sakhi (a woman’s organisation in Kerala), I have come across ICs with men as presiding officers! And to our questions on their conduct, they reply by sharing their report – which is a confidential document that is not to be disclosed even if it is sought by an RTI plea. Such disregard for the IC leads to grave injustice to the women who seek its protection,” Sandhya adds.
Premier institutes not free of prejudice
Even premier institutes in the country have been called out for its unfair treatment of survivors.
Not just the SRFTI, the Film and Television Institute of India has also faced allegations of mistreating complainants of sexual harassment. A few years ago, a letter by a 2016 batch student of FTII appeared in several media reports, in which she accused the director of the institute of taking action against her for complaining about sexual harassment by a classmate. She wrote that she was asked to leave campus and ostracised by other students, while the director intimidated and ridiculed her. Her letter also referenced complaints of sexual harassment made by female students against a male faculty member. According to a 2018 report by The Indian Express, 13 cases of sexual harassment had been filed at FTII since 2010, out of which only one harasser had faced action.
Another prestigious institute — the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology or IIST — has also faced accusations of biased treatment to an erring professor. In 2018, advocate Sandhya shared the story of a woman professor who was allegedly harassed verbally in front of another colleague and a student. Two ICs found the accused professor guilty of harassment, yet the institute let him get away with only a ‘censure’.
Hema Committee and IC revelations
A lack of sensitivity was also alleged in the handling of cases that emerged from the Hema Committee report last year. The report’s exposure of rampant sexual harassment in Malayalam cinema prompted a number of police cases, filed by survivors who felt emboldened by its publication. However, women who had spoken up before the Committee but preferred not to proceed legally were unhappy with the police’s handling of their cases. Several of these cases had to be dropped because the women did not want to cooperate, and felt pressured to do so.
The Hema Committee made quite a point about having ICs in film sets, a rule mandated by an order of the Kerala High Court in 2022. Earlier that year, a woman who revealed her harrowing experience of sexual assault, allegedly by director Liju Krishna, said there was no one on the set to whom she could lodge a complaint. The absence of ICs on film sets sparked discussions that led the court to direct every production unit employing 10 or more people to have an IC in place.
But the Hema Committee noted that even with the ICs in place, there seemed to be little the panel members could do, under the kind of pressure they were in. Even the IC formed by members of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists had disbanded within weeks, following the lack of response to their recommendations in a case against producer-actor Vijay Babu.
Awareness is the key
Sandhya reiterates that continuous awareness is the key to taking advantage of a pro-woman mechanism like the IC. At the other end, awareness classes have played a big role in helping women who have faced harassment to find an avenue. Earlier this year, a young woman in Pathanamthitta, who was serially abused as a child by many men, opened up to her teacher after she attended an awareness class by Snehitha, the state-run gender help desk.
“That [class] was about laws that deal with child abuse — like the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act — and where we could complain about it. The survivor in this case had been distressed for a long time. The community counsellor who took the class said that she could speak to her alone if she wished to. That is how the survivor opened up,” says Anupa, Pathanamthitta district coordinator of Snehitha.