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Loose cannon

Known for hurling baseless allegations, the former raw officer’s complaints against justice HL Dattu fell flat before the Delhi high court

By Shailendra Singh


 Even before Justice HL Dattu took over as the chief justice of India, he’s had a PIL thrust against him, seeking quashing of his appointment. Luckily for him, the PIL was dismissed by a Delhi High Court (HC) bench headed by Chief Justice G Rohini and Justice Nandrajjog.

The petitioner, former RAW officer Nisha Priya Bhatia, alleged that Justice Dattu, who was hearing all her court cases in the Supreme Court (SC), intentionally dismissed her petitions, and thereby caused acute and intense sexual harassment to her. She further said that it was a common practice for intelligence agencies, such as RAW to honeytrap people in luxury hotels and that Justice AK Ganguly had been one of the victims. She claimed to have been approached by the agency to honeytrap someone. On being asked by the chief justice what was the “public interest” in her petition, she could not give a satisfactory reply and her PIL was dismissed. Bhatia started howling inside the court and warned that she would make the coming days miserable for Justice Dattu.

So who is Nisha Priya Bhatia? She was a RAW officer of the 1997 batch and appointed a director in the cabinet secretariat. Her allegations of sexual harassment against various people began in 2007, when she lodged a complaint against her joint secretary. A committee was set up to inquire into the incident, but Bhatia later withdrew her complaint and refused to cooperate. The committee, anyway, completed its probe on May 19, 2008, and found her allegations unfounded.

The secretariat ordered a probe into complaints against her and informed her of the decision on August 19, 2008. She, then, went to the PMO and attempted suicide. She later approached the SC, complaining of sexual harassment by superior officers, but it was dismissed as no merit was found in the case.

Bhatia was also accused in a child trafficking case. She claimed that false allegations were leveled against her by seniors because she had lodged a complaint against them for sexually harassing her in August 2008. One of the accused, Ashok Chaturvedi, was convicted by a lower court, but later, allowed  to go scot-free by the Delhi HC, which compelled Bhatia to file a writ petition against him. Two other RAW officials, Pritam Singh and Ajay Pandey, have also been accused by Bhatia.

What makes her case suspect is that on several occasions, Bhatia has tried to undress herself in court, embarrassing everyone, and leading the judge to order that she be taken for a mental check-up. Her excuse is that she was exasperated by the number of adjournments in the case, sometimes even before the hearing began. Many complaints were also received from different RAW officers against Bhatia for making unauthorized communication and contact with the media, indulging in insubordination and also sending objectionable and offensive SMSes to senior government officials.

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