WE USUALLY SPOKE DURING LATE AFTERNOON while she was between work. Muskan would slip out of her office, a consultancy firm in Mumbai, her phone pressed against her shoulder. “Basically, nothing has happened since our last conversation,” she would tell me in mid-August. It had become a routine conversation starter between us.
We started speaking in June - just over a month after her graduation from MNLU, Nagpur in Waranga, one of three national law schools in Maharashtra, which directly comes under the chancellorship of the chief justice of India. In our very first conversation, she recalled mostly her final day in college. She had finished writing her last college paper when she got the call from the VC’s office. The appeal decision by the Executive Authority in her case had arrived.
“Taking into consideration the overall circumstances, the past conduct of the Appellant and the incidence dated 13/10/2024, the committee has rightly come to a finding of misconduct (sexual harassment),” she read with a paused breath, but quickly leafed over to the next page: “In view of these circumstances, we are of the considered opinion that the findings of the ICC and its recommendations no. 1, 2 and 3…are upheld.” To lay eyes, this was a win, but her heart sank.
In its decision back in January, the Internal Complaints Committee (‘ICC’) had unequivocally found that in October 2024, in the hours past midnight of her college fest, she had been sexually harassed by a batchmate, a topper on campus, in front of several witnesses. The facts, the law had backed her story. It was the ICC’s penalty that had sent her down a spiral — the perpetrator was only to be “prohibited from participating in…cultural events, neither as a position holder, nor as a volunteer, or as an audience member.” He had to abdicate his position in college committees, could not represent the varsity in competitions, and wasn’t to be recommended scholarships for the semester.
But then there was an appeal, and the implementation of the directions put on hold. Now, on her last day, she held in her hands a testament that two separate committees had concluded that she was indeed harassed — it had happened, truly, unforgettably. “[But now] there were no committees to keep him off of, no university events to bar him from, and no scholarships left to withhold,” she wrote in a complaint to the National Commission for Women (‘NCW’) in July.
Under Regulation 10(3) of the UGC Regulations on Sexual Harassment — the ICC could have done much more — directed suspension, restricted him from campus, expelled, struck off his name from the rolls, denied readmission. But the Regulations leave the decision on quantum of punishment to the ICC, and this ICC did none of that.
“[The committees] did not care to understand the intensity, the seriousness of the [harassment],” a staff member affiliated with the university told me. “The order does not even show the sincerity… that this is something that breaches the dignity of an individual.”
When she first saw the decision, Muskan spent days in angst — ‘Is this all? Could this have been enough?’ Months of reliving her nightmare, dramatizing it before the committee — headed by a faculty with a past record (as noted by the NCW) of exhibiting discriminatory behaviour against women students in a different law school — and having to sit beside her perpetrator, as if it were a dispute being negotiated, not an adjudication of harassment, had all come down to this. But worse followed.
She spent weeks writing to the vice chancellor, Vijender Kumar — time was slipping, yet why were the ICC’s recommendations, however meagre, not being followed up? She would recall seeing her harasser strut around campus, jollying in college functions, smirking at her, staring — immune, almost, from consequence. For months prior to the harassment, she alleged, he would leer at her, make her uncomfortable, cajoling her to date him. Was her harassment only a fragment of unreliable memory, something not worthy of remembering?
In March, at last, when she met the vice chancellor, he told her the harasser had filed an appeal. (Regulation 8(4) of the UGC Regulations states that if an appeal is filed within thirty days, ICC recommendations can be stayed. Between the ICC decision and first communication of the appeal to her, more than a month had passed — she was never told when it had been filed, or if within time. In a response to The Leaflet, MNLU Nagpur’s vice chancellor stated that the appeal was filed on February 21, within the thirty day time frame). So, for the next several weeks, the ICC recommendations would hang in limbo — restarting retraumatisation, humiliation.
“One afternoon, they called all the witnesses, both mine and his, at once for a hearing,” she recalled, “Everyone stood outside the corridor at one point, discussing the incident. I wanted to disappear.”
Early on, Muskan realised her struggle was going to be agonising — between 2015 and 2019, the number of higher education institutions that filed status reports to the University Grants Commission under Regulation 3(q) fell steadily (to less than 16 percent of universities and one percent of colleges), and so did the number of complaints they cited. But that was the day she learned, almost doubtlessly, that he had gotten away, aided by the university, with no consequence. In her win, she had resoundingly lost — all, seemingly, within the parameters of the law.
“Do you really want to ruin his career?”
“Are you sure that happened? Are you sure it was not mere remarks?” Trishla Dubey, a young environmental law faculty, asked Muskan one winter morning, as she recalled. She was spellbound — for weeks, she had been unable to sleep (Suditi Yadav, her roommate, told me that most nights Muskan would stay awake or have nightmares about her perpetrator), losing grip over her academic work, her mental and bodily health. In one conversation in September, Muskan told me how difficult writing had become — during her semester papers, her hands would shake, her thoughts, the ink, as if trapped deep inside.
Muskan was before Dubey to ask for an extension on her project submission. When the teacher asked for the cause, Muskan told her about the ongoing ICC proceeding.
“Do you really want to ruin his career?” she recalled Dubey asking.
Muskan broke down. “Her tone was accusatory, dismissing, and frankly traumatizing,” she wrote later in her letter to the NCW. Dubey let her go. She did not respond to an email by The Leaflet enquiring about the alleged incident.
As days piled up, it became increasingly difficult to hold together. In the many months since the harassment, it was the administration and professors who had tested her sanity the most, keeping in motion a cycle of digging into her pain, questioning it — so considerate, so mindful of the young career of a bright boy. Where was she in all this?
Regulation 5(d) of the 2015 Regulations notes that the university must “ensure that victims or witnesses are not victimised or discriminated against while dealing with complaints of sexual harassment.” But like much of this legal document, in MNLU Nagpur, and law schools across the country, it is a provision widely flouted.
Muskan could recall on her fingers the repeating incidents of retraumatising she went through across the process of carrying her harasser to a finding of conviction. In one class, a professor brought up a fictional case that seemed entirely based on her own — not one fact missing. She recalled noticing him looking at her repeatedly, smirking. Her harasser, she recalled, sat in the same class, looking back from a desk ahead, smirking as well. She would try to look away. But could her memories, what she saw, be so soluble?
“On every step, I have been morally discouraged, questioned, asked to reconsider,” she told me. “When they couldn’t talk to me about it, they would erect obstacles in the procedure.” Muskan states that it wasn’t until she approached Kumar, the vice chancellor, about the status of the ICC directions, that she learned an appeal had been filed. When she first asked for a copy, Kumar, she recalled, asked her, “Where in the law is it written that we have to give you the copy of the appeal?” In a response to The Leaflet, Kumar denied having said this.
She wrote an email documenting the interaction and was finally handed a copy. She was given only a few days to reply — if she didn’t, the notice noted, the appeal proceedings would start ex-parte. ‘Ex-parte’ — how ideal might that be, for her to be sidelined altogether? She wondered how many people desired at this point that she simply disappear. The vice chancellor’s office, responding to The Leaflet, put the onus on Muskan - “there was no request to the Enquiry Panel from [the survivor] for granting her extension to submit her written submission.”
To ruin or not ruin the accused’s career — the 2015 Regulations make no mention of the loss of career opportunities of the accused (the only mention, in fact, is of the loss of opportunities of the survivor in lieu of the harassment, considered when determining whether compensation should be issued and recovered from the offender). But courts have considered the harasser’s career a serious factor in POSH cases from universities.
In October 2024, the same month Muskan was harassed, MNLU Mumbai was lodged in a court battle over a sexual harassment case. There, the harasser had been found to be a repeat offender, and the varsity pulled the final trigger — indefinite expulsion (one must wonder whether repeated offences against women are now the minimum threshold to trigger tangible punishments under the 2015 Regulations). When it reached the Bombay HC, while the High Court upheld the ICC’s decision, it deemed the expulsion “excessively harsh,” leading to the harasser’s “academic death,” and modified the order.
It is especially notable how the academic record of male student harassers becomes a defining underpinning of ICC proceedings and the survivor’s experiences. In a series of Instagram posts in 2023, SevenAngryWomen, a feminist collective based at NLU Delhi, shared anonymous experiences of survivors across India’s law schools, particularly NLUs. Revisiting the stories, Muskan realised she was reliving the past lives of many survivors — especially in terms of facing shaming from staff and faculty.
One student from HNLU Raipur wrote anonymously that a survivor in her college was “gaslit by a proctorial board till she cried” and was blamed for being drunk. Another account from NLSIU Bengaluru recalls that after a senior who assaulted her was acquitted “despite a mountain of evidence,” the administration told her, “Mistakes happen, you should move on,” “You went to him child, you cannot point fingers at anyone,” and “You cannot ruin his life like this.” Overheard at NLU Delhi, one student writes anonymously — “Beta, please take back your complaints — you will ruin lives.”
Another survivor, this time in MNLU Mumbai, recalled how her assaulter was a topper of her batch. “I’ve been told by so many people that acting against him would be difficult,” she writes. “I see him in every activity, in positions of responsibility, pretty much everywhere and I’m disgusted with this college for not doing anything.”
Muskan put away the phone, partly exhausted, partly riled.
‘In time and within the law’
A year is about to pass since that night. It was late. Muskan was with her friends, walking back to the hostel from their college fest, when the harasser ran into her. She knew he had been drinking — just the night before, he had barged into her group and started dancing with her, telling her he was drunk. She knew him too — for many preceding months, he had pursued her — the long stares, winks, the occasional comments that discomforted her deeply — “What are you doing with that Baniya?”, she recalled him once asking about a friend, “You should be with a Brahmin.”
In the darkness, he touched her inappropriately multiple times, groped her. For many minutes, she wasn’t sure about much. She waited for her friend, and later recounted all that went down to three colleagues outside the girl’s hostel.
She would recall this many more times before the committees. The proceedings before ICC were punishing — “It was as if it was me who was on trial,” she told me.
Months later, Muskan would often lean back in her chair, wondering if this were truly just a case of time and procedure denying justice, or if there was deeper institutional complicity. She couldn’t tell. Regulation 8(3) of the 2015 Regulations notes that any ICC enquiry must be completed within ninety days — this is only an upper limit. Muskan recalls that when she met the ICC head in early January to ask about the final decision, she told her the committee had concluded but was yet to get all the signatures. The ICC head, as per Muskan, also asked why she was enquiring even though the ninety days weren’t over. Muskan finally received the ICC decision in February.
In a response to Bar and Bench in June, the vice chancellor, Kumar said about her case, “All proceedings happened in time and within the law.”
In time and within the law. Muskan thought of what time had seemed like to her in the last year of her college, like sand slipping through the gaps of her fingers, the harder she held on. In that time, all she could do was write dozens of emails to the VC’s office, most of which went unanswered. In a March email, before she was informed of the appeal, she wrote to him asking why the ICC’s penalties were not being followed, “It sends a message that the university is protecting the perpetrator while isolating and punishing the victim.”
When she was informed of the appeal and given a tight deadline to reply, essential annexures were not shared with her - again it took two more emails to get those out. There was never a reply.
In April, she wrote multiple emails to check on the appeal decision. “You shall not pressurise the panel to pronounce its decision in haste,” the VC shot back in one email, the only reply she ever got.
Even after her graduation, Muskan kept writing to the VC. The time it took for the appeal decision had rendered her reliefs meaningless, but there was still one small silver lining - the original ICC decision had directed disciplinary action against the harasser for alcohol consumption. The appeal decision reiterated this direction. But even then, the disciplinary committee seemed like a myth - no response from the administration on the committee’s fate came. Another list of emails went, and never replied to.
A detailed questionnaire was sent by The Leaflet on October 2. On October 8, MNLU Nagpur’s vice chancellor stated that since the perpetrator was “no more on the roll of the University, the Disciplinary Committee of the University [did] not have jurisdiction to conduct Disciplinary proceedings” - meaning that one of the only effective recommendations of the ICC was also infructuous now.
It noted, however, that now in order to “dispense complete justice”, it had decided to place three agenda items in the upcoming academic and executive committee meetings: first, a proposal to “debar [him] from attending his Convocation and receiving his degree in person”, second since the University has till now not issued the “Character/Conduct Certificate to [him],...the matter will be [placed] before the Competent Authorities for necessary directions,” and third, a proposal to be placed before the Competent Authorities that he “should not be considered for any Academic Medals or Honours during the Convocation.”
A legal structure where just relief is often denied
When I spoke to Muskan in August, she was in distress. She had heard, she told me, that the harasser had been trying to collect recommendation letters from faculty members to pursue higher education abroad.
She was thinking increasingly of the years ahead, the choices before her. But she was not willing to forego the memory of what had happened, of the systemicity of the injustice she had faced. “Our university proudly claims to follow the POSH Act, but they do not even have a sexual harassment policy in place,” she wrote in her NCW complaint, also noting that she had rarely seen any awareness around POSH procedure. Vijender Kumar, MNLU Nagpur’s vice chancellor, when asked about the absence of a POSH policy, told The Leaflet that the university followed the procedure under the POSH Act and the 2015 Regulations. However, he noted, “the internal rules are under the review process after being submitted by the elected Student Members of the Gender Sensitization Committee of the University and will be adopted and implemented soon.”
“If I knew how precisely the procedure must be, I wouldn’t have let them victimise me, wouldn’t have let so much time pass in silence — things would have gone differently,” she told me one day.
In summer, she filed an RTI application. The findings partly validated her trauma — MNLU Nagpur had not submitted annual status reports to the UGC since 2022, a mandatory requirement under Regulation 3(1)(q) of the 2015 Regulations. Regulation 12 traces twelve types of penal actions universities can be subjected to for non-compliance. MNLU Nagpur’s vice chancellor told The Leaflet that there had “been no case of Sexual Harassment in the University in the past and the present case will be reported this year.”
A finding by The Leaflet, based on published Rules and Regulations and conversations with students associated with universities, found that of 24 NLUs (not including four established post-2023), nine — NLIU Bhopal, NUALS Kochi, HNLU Raipur, RMLNLU Lucknow, CNLU Patna, NUSRL Ranchi, NLUJA Assam, MNLU Nagpur and MNLU Aurangabad — did not have a finalised POSH policy even on paper. While no reliable data exists on POSH policies or general POSH compliance in India’s other law schools (public and private), practitioners have noted that in the absence of robust procedures, the 2015 Regulations have suffered.
The absence of POSH policies is an epidemic across India’s universities. This, despite courts such as the Kerala HC in 2023, pressing that the UGC must ensure “such issues are effectively monitored and implemented.”
In our conversations, Muskan and I often spoke about how, perhaps somewhere, the issue runs deeper - the 2015 Regulations have been rendered systematically toothless, but within the law, too, broad discretion, added with a notable lack of consideration of the survivor’s perspective by courts, has resulted in a structure where just relief is often denied.
In many ways, she understands she is past the sturdiest hurdle as a survivor - getting a finding of conviction by the ICC (twice). Last month, the Delhi HC had affirmed that a POSH IC inquiry, irrespective of its findings, does not necessarily bar a criminal trial. So much, she feels, banks on her forgetting, floating away.
Against all odds, Muskan cannot forget - neither her sexual harassment, nor the months of red-tape abuse that pushed for her to forget, if never forgive. Life has a ruthless way of moving on. Most of her days, she distracts herself with her work. Then, there are those liminal moments, on afternoons, when silence feels unbearable. In those moments, she picks up her phone, her laptop - she knows she must tell someone.
Note:
The Leaflet was inclined to communicate with and seek response from the individual accused of sexual harassment and subsequently found guilty by the Internal Complaints Committee and the Executive Authority. Our inclination was inspired by journalistic ethics. However, in due compliance with the framework of The Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 and The University Grants Commission (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal of Sexual Harassment of Women Employees and Students in Higher Educational Institutions) Regulations, 2015, The Leaflet is not in a position to either identify or communicate directly with the said individual.