An Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) in Assam has joined the #MeToo movement, posting on social media about a six-year-old case of workplace harassment by her senior.
Leena Doley, an officer from the 2002 batch of the Assam State Public Service, took to Facebook to say she would take her “fight to the next level” after having failed to get justice from a probe committee set up under the Vishakha Guidelines in 2012.
Ms. Doley was serving with the Police Control Room in Guwahati when Mukesh Agarwal, then Inspector General of Police allegedly offered to take her on a holiday without her husband’s knowledge.
Personal tragedy
On March 12, 2012 — two days after the “proposal” — Ms. Doley lodged a written complaint with then Assam Police chief Jayanta Narayan Choudhury. A committee was promptly set up, but the panel dismissed her complaint.
“My case was dismissed as a misunderstanding, although the perpetrator himself admitted to what he did. The perpetrator had asked me to accompany him to a holiday destination, without, of course, telling my husband,” she wrote in her social media post.
“To cut a long story short, my husband committed suicide after around six months of my submitting my complaint against Mukesh Agrawal,” Ms. Doley said, adding that former additional chief secretary Emily Choudhury came to her house as the inquiry officer the day she registered a case of unnatural death.
“She came to assure me that it was not because of the complaint that my husband killed himself. I didn't react. I was beyond any reaction. But the inquiry procedures had not started till then,” she wrote. While she did not go public with issue then, Ms Doley said, the “#MeToo campaign has given me the opportunity to tell my story in my words”.
Mr. Agarwal, now the Additional Director General of Police (ADGP Law and Order), and the Director General of Police Kuladhar Saikia did not respond to queries on Ms. Doley’s post. Assam’s Home principal secretary L.S. Changsan said the government would not initiate any step on the ASP’s outburst on social media.
“What can we say about a case that could not be substantiated and was thus dismissed long ago?” Ms Changsan said.