New Delhi:
The Executive Committee of the Supreme Court Bar Association has passed a resolution in favour of the woman judge from Madhya Pradesh, who alleged harassment by another judge.
The case needs to be thoroughly probed, as it prima facie amounts to sexual harassment, the resolution said. The committee has requested the Chief Justice of India RM Lodha to take immediate action and order an FIR in the case.
Assuring that all possible help will be extended to the woman, the resolution added, "The committee is very much disturbed and anguished by the statements contained in her representation".
The woman, an additional judge in Gwalior, had resigned on July 15, alleging sexual harassment by a judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court.
In her complaint to the President, the Chief Justice of India and the Union Law Minister, she said the judge had asked her to "dance to an item number". She also alleged that when she spurned the judge's "various advances and malicious aspirations", he targeted her professionally.
A "false, frivolous and malicious reporting" was made, on basis of which she was transferred on July 8, in the mid-academic session of her daughters, to a remote place, "overruling the transfer policy of MP high court," she said in the complaint.
"I will do my best for the institution," Justice Lodha had said.
A Supreme Court bench has refused an early hearing of the case. In response to a petition demanding the filing of an FIR, a judicial inquiry and suspension of the accused high court judge, the bench, headed by Justice Lodha, said, "We will see this when it comes to us".