Ashok Ganguly was a
spirited judge at the Supreme Court, and, after heading the West Bengal Human
Rights Commission post-retirement, he built in no time a formidable reputation
as a tenacious watchdog for human rights violation.
But his stature got deep-sixed from the
most unexpected quarters, an intern who'd worked for him, when she wrote in her
blog that the ex-judge had sexually harassed her nearly a year ago. In the
surcharged atmosphere of the Tarun Tejpal affair, the blog worked like a
matchstick struck in a tinderbox. The blogpost was mysteriously discovered by
Attorney General G. E. Vahanvati who moved the Supreme Court post-haste, and
the Chief Justice of India
promptly set up a fact-finding committee of three judges.
It soon became known
that the alleged victim had filed an affidavit to the three judges, in addition
to giving her video-recorded version of the incident, but its content was kept
under wraps. Even Ganguly, who was quizzed, was not given any clue of the
content of the affidavit. Nor did the intern come forward to file a formal
police complaint, which alone could be the starting point of an investigation.
Meanwhile, Indira Jaisingh, Additional Solicitor General, published a newspaper
article containing what she claimed to be nuggets of the victim's allegation.
Loaded with suggestions that the ex-judge of the Supreme Court had played the
old lover boy with a young girl his "grand-daughter's age", at a
suite of Le Meridien Hotel in New Delhi on the 2012 Christmas Eve night, the
document plunges the knife into Ganguly's reputation as it lists, in bold
letters, an array of offensive acts catalogued in the Supreme Court's Vishaka
judgment of the 1990's and included in the recent Harassment of Women in Work
Place law. Making physical contacts or advances, demanding sexual favours,
uttering sexually coloured remarks, indulging in unwelcome physical verbal or
non-verbal conduct of sexual natures—the intern's allegation supposedly
contains the misbehaviours listed in the law down to a T.
Obviously,
politicians became strident in their demand for Ganguly's removal. Leading
their pack is West Bengal Chief Minister
Mamata Bannerjee, who went to the extent of approaching President Pranab
Mukherjee, twice, to use his authority for Ganguly's ouster. The ex-judge has
been dogged in his denial of all allegations. But what is at stake is not the
criminality of his conduct but his "proved misbehaviour". Under the
law governing human rights commissions, its members, including a state chief,
can be removed for "proved misbehaviour". Regardless of the incident
being before or after the sexual harassment law, the court will consider
nothing other than the misbehaviour part of the charge, no doubt in the light
of available evidence. The intern's version supposedly mentions the text
messages that Ganguly sent her after she'd left the hotel room in humiliation
and rage. The SMS's are now "frozen" as evidence. And Vahanvati has
again played his role as Ganguly's nemesis, recommending to the President,
through the Home Ministry, that he may order the Supreme Court, through a
Presidential reference, to set up a committee to investigate the charges. There
is no doubt, therefore, that Ganguly cannot escape trial nor can he save either
his present job or reputation if the judicial investigation holds him guilty of
misbehaviour, not to speak of sexual harassment.
However, in the
interest of fair trial, it is necessary to point at a series of possible
conflicts of interest that may have marked Ganguly's all too sudden fall from
grace. The first possible conflict of interest is with Vahanvati, who defended
the UPA Government in the Supreme Court on the much discussed 2G spectrum case.
Ganguly led the bench that overturned the government's plea that it was within
its rights to distribute the 2G telecom spectrum on first-come-first-serve
basis, almost free of cost. The bench not only passed a series of adverse
remarks that still besmirches the integrity of the government—remarks that
eventually turned UPA into a symbol of corruption in popular imagination—but
turned down, by a single stroke of pen, as many as 122 licences that were
issued. It is said that among these disheartened licensees was one of
Vahanvati's very special corporate friends.
It is Ganguly who
undeniably set the tone of the Supreme Court during the UPA 2 rule as the
judiciary generally accepted the view of the Comptroller and Auditor General
that natural resources like wireless frequency or fossil fuel were not to be
offered to private parties at the executive's own sweet will but required to be
publicly auctioned in a transparent manner. Vahanvati, as the government's top
law officer, was no doubt piqued by a hostile judiciary.
The other, and more
serious, conflict could have arisen from the West Bengal
CM who ironically had been instrumental in the appointment of Ganguly as the
chairman of the state Human Rights Commission. May be she thought
that Ganguly would be pliable enough to legitimise, from a high office, most of
her authoritarian acts—be it brushing aside an incident of rape as an
“opposition conspiracy”, detaining a university teacher for merely forwarding a
cartoon of her, arresting a person saying he’s a Maoist while all he did was to
ask her uncomfortable questions on a public occasion. Earlier this year, in a
gang-rape incident in North 24 Parganas district, in which a group of Mamata’s
Trinamool Congress workers were allegedly involved, Ganguly took an
extraordinarily tough stand. He summoned the state home secretary; and the CM
prevented his obedient secretary to appear before the Human Rights Commission.
Interestingly, in September, a month after the fracas over the summons, Ganguly
received an abusive letter from a female law clerk in a district court,
threatening him that she might sue her for “rape”. All this does in no way suggest
that Ganguly is not guilty, or otherwise, of the alleged misdemeanour for which
he’s likely to be investigated by a committee of learned judges. It only
suggests that there are powerful people who may be overjoyed if Ganguly is
removed from his post, for reasons other than their moral concerns.
(The author is National Editor of
Lokmat
group of newspapers
based in Delhi)
