Kolkata: As the Indian judiciary tries to grapple with another accusation of sexual harassment, this time on a sitting judge, Kolkata High Court judges and seniors advocates are refusing to take women as secretaries and interns.
Many of the sitting judges have already notified the court officials of their objection of having women secretaries. One sitting judge has even written a letter stating that unless cameras are installed in his chamber, he will not accept women as secretaries.
“I am on the verge of my retirement, who wants to get into unnecessary trouble of having to face such accusation at this old age,” said the sitting Judge of Kolkata High Court, unwilling to be named.
However, this decision has put law students under tremendous pressure. The education system expects that a law graduate generally joins a senior advocate as a junior to learn the modalities of the job. But with such refusals, students are facing difficulty.
“If we are not accepted by interns just because we are women, then the judges and advocates are themselves violating the fundamental rights of the individuals that they are supposed to [uphold],” said one student of National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS).
The university officials are also under tremendous pressure, since the number of female students has increased to an extent that they outnumber males. “If judges refuse to take interns, then we have a serious problem in hand as many will have no foreseeable career, since even today the number of practising women advocates and judges are quite low,” said the register of NUJS.
Many blamed the law intern who accused Ganguly as the principal cause of this trouble. “She should have made an official complaint to the police. But what she did was to write a blog which was taken up by a legal online magazine, which eventually caught the fancy of the media and Justice Ganguly had to suffer, though till now not even a single police complaint has been filed. She is still to record her statement in front of Delhi police,” said a senior lawyer.
However, most believe that this is a passing phenomenon and a knee-jerk reaction to the recent incident, things will normalise. “Men and women have never cohabited in an atmosphere of fear and lack of mutual trust. Things will normalise as the media glare goes away,” said a woman lawyer.
