Two women harassed in Borivli, Vasai for spurning romantic advances

Two instances of harassment on Thursday have highlighted how women in Mumbai continue to be under threat of sexual harassment for merely being disinterested in their assailants. In one case, an out-of-work newspaper delivery boy allegedly slashed the face of a beautician who had been spurning his advances, resulting in her needing 22 stitches on her face. [caption id=“attachment_1106697” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AFP[/caption] According to a Times of India report, the assailant Mayur Phatavle, 25, and the 22-year-old beautician lived in the same neighbourhood in Borivli East. After they got acquainted on a social media site, Phatavle began pursuing the girl to marry him, but she rejected his advances repeatedly.  “I repeatedly told him that I was not interested, but he just did not get it,” the beautician told the newspaper. The girl would repeatedly ignore his advances, even as Phatavle threatened to end his life by drinking phenyl, and would follow her to her place of work. On Thursday evening, the victim and her boss at the parlour she worked at wound up work and left together around 7pm. “We had just wound up work and were leaving the parlour when he turned up and insisted on speaking to her. When we started walking away, he started acting violently. I pushed him away using my umbrella but, suddenly, he took out a blade and slashed the girl on her face and ran away,” said the owner of the parlour to DNA newspaper. The victim was then taken to Bhagwati Hospital at Borivli, where the assailant was summoned in a trap, and then nabbed by the police. In a second case of harassment, the Vasai Youth Congress president was held for allegedly threatening a girl with a toy gun on her birthday when she did not return his advances. According to a Mumbai Mirror report, Kuldeep Vartak, 28, had been friendly with the girl  from a Vasai college, and when she didn’t invite him to her birthday party, he reached the end of his patience. “As the girl was seeing off her friends at around 1 am that night, a drunk Kuldeep, with his friends Roger Dias and Rupesh D’mello, swept up at her building in a car. Vartak whipped out a toy pistol and brandished it at the girl, threatening her for not reciprocating his love,” says the report. The next day, the girl, persuaded to do so by her friends, the girl went to the station and lodged a police complaint. Though Vartak and his friends attempted to concoct alibis, the police arrested him and two of his friends. PI Rajendra Mohite of Waliv police station in Vasai told Mumbai Mirror that Vartak didn’t deny what he had done, but said he had only wanted to “surprise” the girl. Vartak and his friends received bail from the Vasai court, but as a part of the preventive drive of the police to keep sexual harassment at bay during the Ganesh festival, they were rearrested.