An officer of the Indian Administrative Service in Haryana accused a top bureaucrat of her department on Sunday of sexually harassing her for writing “adverse comments on official files”, PTI reported. She alleged that the officer and some of his colleagues were now threatening her.
The 28-year-old wrote on Facebook that the officer had summoned her to his office on May 22 and “threatened” her. “He questioned me why I write on files the wrongs the department has done,” she wrote. He allegedly threatened to file a complaint and “spoil her Annual Confidential Report if she did not stop writing adverse comments on the official files”.
She claimed that the senior officer had called her to his office again on May 31, and asked his staff that “no other person should enter the room”. “He asked me to tell what type of work I wanted to do, whether I want departmental work or time-pass work,” she wrote in her Facebook post. “And then he asked me to stop writing adverse comments on the files.”
The woman officer claimed that her senior had told her that she needed to be explained everything like a “newly wed bride”. “His behaviour seemed immoral,” she said.
On June 6, the accused officer allegedly called her at his office again and asked her to stay there for over two hours. “I was sitting on the other side of the table in front of him,” the woman wrote. “He asked me to get up and come closer to his chair. When I reached the other side of the table, he pretended to teach me how to operate a computer. I rushed back to my chair... After some time, he got up. Pretending to find a paper, he came close to my chair and pushed it.”
The accused officer has denied the allegations and said that he had advised the woman “not to find faults with the files which have got all necessary clearances from other officials”. He told PTI that the allegations were “false and baseless”. He said that he had gone out of his way to help the officer, and “tried to teach” her as she was young.
The woman officer said everything would become clear if the closed-circuit television footage was examined. She said she had sent an e-mail to the President of India over the incident.
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