St Stephen's sexual harassment row: Audio clips claim Thampu tried to hush up case

After a Delhi University PhD student filed an FIR accusing a St Stephen’s professor of sexually harassing her and principal Valson Thampu of shielding him, the principal had written a defiant op-ed for NDTV dismissing her allegations. Though he didn’t quite explain why the college’s internal complaints committee (ICC) hadn’t been able to resolve the issue in over six months, Thampu said that he had done enough for the victim. In fact, he even suggested that it was the victim who was in two minds about pursuing a sexual harassment case against Chemistry professor Satish Kumar. However, it is being reported that the victim has submitted recordings of conversations between her and Kumar, and Thampu, which suggest that the St Stephen’s principal had tried to discourage her from pursuing the complaint further. While the authenticity of the audio files, which were recorded on a phone is yet to be verified, the victim alleges that the men in the recordings are Kumar and Thampu. The St Stephen’s principal, however, came close to admitting that one of the voices is indeed his, as he posted on Facebook about ‘mischievously edited transcripts’. NDTV reports Thampu as posting on Facebook, “I shall make no comments on the merit of the contents and how cleverly they have been manipulated, insofar as a police investigation into the case is in progress. I have good reasons to believe that the truth will come out. I also believe that the Courts will not let themselves be prejudiced through this motivated media campaign."  [caption id=“attachment_2325372” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  St Stephen’s College.[/caption] According to a report on The Times of India, the recordings bolster the victim’s claim that Thampu tried to intimidate her into withdrawing the complaint against the accused professor Satish Kumar. One of the recordings has a man, alleged to be Thampu, presenting before the victim the options she has to deal with this issue. Like we have noted in this article previously,  the principal, which is also evident from these conversations, was far from sympathetic or empathetic to the victim. In one instance, he is heard saying, “Please don’t make my work more difficult. You have to take that complaint back. Aaj hi karoge, nahin to complication ho jayega.” In another instance he is heard telling the victim, that if the complaints committee calls her she should tell them that she has no complaints, the matter is resolved and she doesn’t want to talk about it any more. The other option, he says, will lead to ‘media attention’. Thampu had written in his account on NDTV that, “On January 10 2015, the complainant meets with the Principal with a handwritten request reiterating the request made on the previous day (9. 1. 2015) “not to pass on the document to the internal complaints committee of the College” as she needs “time to re-think.” However, it now seems that Thampu may have been the reason why the PhD student needed to ’re-think’ her decision to lodge a complaint against the professor. Firstpost had noted in an earlier article that even if Thampu was playing by the rule book, he did nothing to help the victim and her family in the truest sense of the word: “The complainant and her family’s anxiety is hardly surprising.  Thampu’s role here should have been to assuage the family’s fears, and assure them of his full support to ensure there would be no such damage to her future. There is no evidence that he or anyone in the college – at the very least – tried to counsel the complainant and advise her on the best way to pursue the incident. Instead of allaying her fears, the institution presented her with a set of options, asking her to choose and accept whatever consequences that would follow.” The principal had written in his account that the victim’s father had pleaded with ‘folded hands’ that his daughter’s reputation should not be tarnished. However, he did nothing to assure the family that acting against a sexual harasser is a mark of courage and doesn’t ’taint’ the victim’s ‘reputation’. The victim was relentlessly pursued by the professor and according to her FIR, subjected to verbal and physical sexual harassment. She was asked by her professor if she had a ’thigh gap’, was shown pictures of nude women and also stopped from using the college’s internet and other such facilities.   If the voice in the recordings does indeed belongs to Thampu, then he is no less guilty than primary accused Kumar in putting the victim through trauma. Being in knowledge of an incident of sexual harassment and not protesting is bad enough, but if the recording is to be believed, the principal seems to have done his best to shield the accused. That too by intimidating the victim whose first preference for seeking help must have been Thampu.