A General Court Martial (GCM) of the Army has sacked Captain Poonam Kaur of the Army Service Corps (ASC) for levelling false allegations of sexual harassment against her seniors.Captain Kaur had complained that her Commanding Officer Colonel R K Sharma and Lt Col Ajay Chawla, and Major Suraj Bhan had physically and mentally harassed her after she turned down their physical advances, and that they had kept her in illegal confinement in her quarters at the Kalka military station. She had said that she had been facing contiinuing harassment since she was posted in Kalka, and that all her efforts to resolve the matter with the intervention of Army authorities had failed.
The Court of Inquiry appointed to investigate her allegations held that there was no basis for these charges and later recommended a court martial against her for "false charges." Her counsel says that:
The army has not had the best track record with respect to these issues. In 2007, there were only 945 women out of a total of 35,377 officers in the Army. No female officer had lodged a harassment complaint against a superior officer till 1999 - and the pioneer, Major Dr. Hemalata Kakkar, although she succeeded in her complaint, was unaccountably punished for it by never being permitted to complete her medical training with the army. In January this year, the army was 'slammed' by the Supreme Court of India for refusing to constitute a complaints committee to examiine a sexual harassment complaint made by a principal of an Army School against a colonel.
So it makes me wonder what actually happened, and how much of this takes place everyday and is never reported by women for fear of punishment.
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