In Nagpur’s national law university, a sexual harassment survivor refuses to forget

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.”