The Delhi police has reportedly reinstated the husband and the brother-in-law of the former Supreme Court staffer who submitted a sworn affidavit accusing Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment.
According to a report in the Indian Express, the two have been reinstated as head constables in the Delhi police. According to the complainant, the two had been suspended from their duties after she was sacked as a Supreme Court staffer.
According to the IE report, the suspension order against the two has been revoked but the departmental inquiry against them will continue.
The complainant’s husband and brother-in-law, both of whom were with the police, were suspended on December 28, citing a six year old case of a colony dispute, which had been settled before, she had said.
The woman, in her affidavit that was submitted to 22 Supreme Court judges on April 19, had stated that she was sexually harassed by CJI Ranjan Gogoi on two counts in October 2018 when she was posted to work in his office. The woman alleged that two months after the incident, she was dismissed from service on December 21, and her entire family had to bear the aftermath.
She added that when she and her husband had gone to their ancestral village in Rajasthan in March, the Delhi police took them for questioning her in a two-year-old “cheating case” involving Rs 50,000 that she had allegedly taken from someone with a promise of giving them a job.
The day after that, along with the woman and her husband, her brother-in-law and wife and another male relative were subjected to physical and mental abuse, with their hands and legs cuffed.
The woman had also recounted an episode from January when she was called to the Chief Justice’s residence and asked to apologise to his wife by prostrating before her and rubbing her nose on the floor. The woman wrote in the letter that she could not understand why her family was continuously attacked even after she apologized in this manner.
After her letter was published by four media outlets, the CJI held a special hearing and claimed a larger threat to the judiciary. He constituted an internal three-judge panel to hear the complainant’s charges. The panel, which comprised of Justices Sharad Bobde, Indu Malhotra and Indira Banerjee, gave CJI Ranjan Gogoi a clean chit in the sexual harassment case.