The Greater Chennai Police have been accused of serious misconduct, including destruction of evidence, after a woman attempting to file a sexual harassment complaint was allegedly made to wait for three days before an FIR was registered, following the intervention of a senior officer.
On Saturday, February 20, the victim, a dentist by profession, allegedly caught her 57-year-old neighbour filming her while she was in the washroom. She raised an alarm, confronted him, and in the ensuing altercation, seized his mobile phone.
When she approached the Ayanavaram police station to file a complaint, Inspector Varghish Ignatius Raja of the Ayanavaram K2 police station allegedly refused to register it. Instead, he is accused of pressuring the victim to enter into a compromise and coercing her into destroying the phone containing the recording.
“The victim reached the police station around 2.30 pm but was made to wait until 6 pm on the pretext that the inspector was not present,” said Advocate V Shanmugasundar, legal counsel for the complainant. “When the inspector did speak to her, it was in private, in violation of Supreme Court guidelines mandating the presence of a woman officer. During this time, the accused and his family were also present at the station. The inspector allegedly warned that the accused’s family would commit suicide and urged the victim to compromise instead of filing a complaint.”
She was also reportedly asked to produce witnesses to substantiate her complaint.
According to the advocate, the inspector then directed her to submerge the phone in a bucket of water inside the police station, claiming that the video could otherwise be leaked.
Subsequently, the victim approached the Deputy Commissioner of Police (Kilpauk), Jareena Begum, who intervened and ensured that an FIR was registered on Monday, December 22. The police visited the scene on Tuesday at around 11 am.