Delhi Police starts preliminary probe into sexual assault charge against retired SC judge

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police has begun a preliminary inquiry into a complaint of sexual harassment against a former Supreme Court judge by a law student who had interned with him even as a second intern levelled similar allegations. The new allegations were made on Facebook, but the post has since been deleted, website Legally India reported.

The episode is putting an unprecedented spotlight on the highest levels of Indian judiciary, particularly its capacity to deal with serious charges against a senior judge. While members of the higher judiciary have faced allegations of corruption, a charge of sexual harassment has never been levelled against a sitting or retired SC judge.

The website claimed the second intern had alleged similar behaviour by the retired SC judge in a Facebook comment on the original blog by the Kolkata-based law student that had blown the lid off the whole affair.

The second intern alleged — in comments which the website said had been posted on November 11 — that she been “at the receiving end of unsolicited sexual advance (sic) more than once” and when she confronted him (the former judge) he promised that “that he would never misbehave with another lady”.

A committee of three sitting judges, consisting of Justices RM Lodha, HL Dattu and Ranjana Desai, is already probing the first allegation of harassment by the law student, who is from a Kolkata college, who interned with the judge.

The committee has summoned the law student to depose before it on November 18, 2013 and the student has confirmed that she would do so.

She had claimed that she was harassed around the same time as the mass protests in Delhi in Dec, 2012, in the wake of the gangrape of a student, when she went to help a “highly reputed, recently retired” judge who she had earlier interned with.