The robes hide a dirty secret. Senior advocate Indira Jaising has said it again, this time on 1 September 2026, and the institution that lectures the country on dignity, equality and the rule of law still pretends not to hear.
Sexual harassment in the Indian judiciary is not a rumour whispered in corridors. It is a pattern documented in affidavits, in-house reports that never see daylight, impeachment motions that collapse, transfers that look like punishment, and resignations that courts later admit were not voluntary. The same institution that invented the Vishaka guidelines and lectures employers on POSH compliance has, when the accused wears a robe, repeatedly chosen opacity, brotherhood and delay.
Jaising’s latest indictment is not new. It is accumulated evidence
At the 29th D.S. Borker Memorial Lecture, Jaising stated she has represented multiple women judges who came to her with complaints of sexual harassment by male judges. She called it “the dirty secret of the judiciary of India. No one wants to talk about it.”
She described a practice she said a woman district judge recounted: when a High Court judge retires, women district court judges are asked to line up, wear sarees of the same colour, and throw flowers at male judges walking into the dining room. The same woman judge, Jaising said, was asked by a male judge to attend his 25th wedding anniversary and dance to an “item number.” She refused. She lost her job.
That account tracks the long-running Madhya Pradesh case of Additional District and Sessions Judge “X” versus the Registrar General of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. The officer, selected second in the 2011 higher judicial service exam and posted at Gwalior, alleged that Justice S.K. Gangele’s wife conveyed a request that she perform a dance to an item song at the judge’s 25th anniversary ladies’ sangeet in December 2013. Other alleged incidents followed at functions. After she resisted, she was transferred mid-academic session to Sidhi—hundreds of kilometres away—while her daughter was in Class 12. Her representations were rejected. She resigned on 15 July 2014.
In-house committees found insufficient material to establish sexual harassment. A Rajya Sabha inquiry committee under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968—Justice R. Banumathi, Justice Manjula Chellur and senior advocate K.K. Venugopal—concluded in 2017 that the sexual harassment charges were “not proved beyond reasonable doubt.” It simultaneously found the mid-session transfer “not justified,” “punitive,” and evidence of a “total lack of human face.” It recommended she be reinstated if she wished. Impeachment died.
On 10 February 2022, a Supreme Court bench of Justices L. Nageswara Rao and B.R. Gavai held her resignation “cannot be construed to be voluntary,” quashed the acceptance of resignation, and ordered reinstatement with continuity of service from July 2014 (no back wages). Jaising argued the case. The court focused on the transfer’s contravention of policy and arbitrariness; it did not independently convict anyone of harassment. Eight years after the events, the officer got her job back. The accused judge kept his.
That is the template: allegation, opaque inquiry by judicial brethren, “not proved” or “no substance,” complainant’s career wrecked or delayed for years, institution’s reputation papered over.
Ranjan Gogoi: the case that still stinks because the process was designed to protect the office, not test the truth
On 19 April 2019 a 35-year-old former junior court assistant sent a sworn affidavit to 22 Supreme Court judges. She alleged that on 10 and 11 October 2018—days after Ranjan Gogoi became Chief Justice—he pressed his body against her in his residence office, hugged her around the waist, touched her, and said “hold me.” She said she froze and tried to pull away. After she rebuffed him she was moved out of that posting and dismissed on 21 December 2018. Grounds cited included taking a day’s casual leave without approval and approaching an official about seating.
What followed was not an investigation. It was theatre of institutional self-preservation.
On Saturday, 20 April, Gogoi sat on an extraordinary bench that included himself. The Attorney General and Solicitor General were present. The complainant was not. From the bench he called the allegations an attempt to “destabilise the judiciary.” An in-house committee of Justices S.A. Bobde, Indu Malhotra and Indira Banerjee was formed. The complainant participated for three days, then withdrew on 30 April, saying she was denied a lawyer, the atmosphere was frightening, and she did not expect justice. The committee proceeded ex parte, heard Gogoi on 1 May, and on 6 May announced it had found “no substance” in the allegations. The report would not be made public. The court cited Indira Jaising v. Supreme Court of India (2003) 5 SCC 494.
Jaising’s response was immediate: “#NotInMyName This is a scandal.” The 2003 case, she noted, itself concerned sexual harassment allegations against sitting Karnataka High Court judges; the report was kept secret; the judgment predated the RTI Act and was “bad in law.” She demanded disclosure in public interest. The complainant never received the report. Women lawyers publicly objected that the process violated natural justice and Vishaka principles. There was, and is, no independent external forum when the accused is the Chief Justice.
The woman was later reinstated in January 2020. A separate inquiry by retired Justice A.K. Patnaik into an alleged larger conspiracy found that conspiracy “cannot be completely ruled out” but that limited powers and missing electronic records prevented corroboration. The Supreme Court closed the related suo motu proceedings in 2021. Gogoi retired, was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, and the sealed report stayed sealed.
An institution that will not publish the findings of an inquiry into its own head, that lets the accused sit on the first bench that frames the narrative, and that then cites a pre-RTI secrecy judgment written in another harassment controversy, is not administering justice. It is administering damage control.
The other names the robes would prefer forgotten
This is not one man’s story.
A.K. Ganguly, retired Supreme Court judge and then chairman of the West Bengal Human Rights Commission, faced allegations from a law intern about events in a Delhi hotel room in December 2012. A Supreme Court panel found he had subjected her to “unwelcome sexual behaviour.” Jaising made the intern’s affidavit public and wrote asking whether this was how their Lordships would treat their daughters. Ganguly resigned from the rights commission in January 2014 after political and public pressure. No criminal conviction followed. The intern’s choice not to pursue a police case became another convenient dead end.
Swatanter Kumar, retired Supreme Court judge and then National Green Tribunal chairperson, was accused by a law intern of unwelcome physical contact and advances during a 2011 internship while he was still on the Supreme Court. The intern approached the Chief Justice in late 2013. A full-court resolution had already decided the court would not entertain complaints against retired judges. Kumar called it a “malicious conspiracy,” sued media houses and the intern for defamation, and obtained a Delhi High Court interim injunction restricting reporting. The allegations were never independently adjudicated to a public finding of fact. They simply receded behind injunctions and jurisdictional technicalities.
Add the 2003 Karnataka High Court episode that produced the very judgment later used to bury the Gogoi report: a three-judge committee gave sitting judges a clean chit; Jaising petitioned to make the report public; the Supreme Court refused, saying in-house reports are for the Chief Justice’s “own information and satisfaction” and publicity would harm the institution. Harm to whom, exactly?
Jaising has also said, on record, that she herself was sexually harassed in the corridors of the Supreme Court—under CCTV, with grey hair, as a senior advocate and former Additional Solicitor General. If that is possible at the apex, the hierarchy below does not require imagination.
Hierarchy is not culture. It is the enabling condition
Jaising’s point about flower-throwing lines and item-number invitations is not colourful anecdote. It describes a feudal chain of command in which district judges exist at the pleasure of High Court administrative judges, confidential reports and transfers can be used as weapons, and a woman who says no can find herself posted hundreds of kilometres away in mid-session with a child in Class 12.
The POSH Act and Vishaka guidelines assume an Internal Complaints Committee that is not controlled by the accused. When the accused is a High Court judge or the Chief Justice, that architecture collapses. The in-house procedure is judges investigating judges. Reports stay confidential. The only constitutional removal route—impeachment—requires numbers in Parliament that almost never materialise. Justice Gangele’s motion had 58 Rajya Sabha signatures; the committee still found the gravest charge unproved. Gogoi never faced anything resembling an external inquiry.
Meanwhile the gender arithmetic remains an embarrassment the collegium treats as optional. As of early 2026, official figures showed one woman judge out of 33 working judges in the Supreme Court (about 3 percent). High Courts had roughly 116 women out of a working strength in the 780–814 range—about 14–15 percent. Some High Courts had zero. Subordinate courts do better, around 38 percent, which only highlights how the pipeline is throttled at the top. An overwhelmingly male, self-appointing higher judiciary investigating complaints by women subordinates is not a coincidence of statistics. It is a structural conflict of interest.
Parliament was told that complaints against sitting judges of the higher judiciary exceeded 1,100 in 2025. Those are not all sexual-harassment complaints. They do show that the public and litigants keep knocking on a door the institution prefers to keep locked from the inside.
What these cases do to the idea of justice
Every sealed report, every Saturday special bench that includes the accused, every “no substance” announcement without reasons, every complainant who waits eight years for a court to admit her resignation was not voluntary, teaches the same lesson: if you are a woman inside this system, the process itself is the punishment.
The judiciary’s public language is lofty—constitutional morality, gender justice, sensitivity. Its private practice, when the complaint is against one of its own, has too often been: constitute a brotherhood committee, keep the paper secret, transfer or dismiss the inconvenient employee, wait for memory to fade, and if a senior lawyer like Jaising will not shut up, cite her own old case against her.
That is why the Gogoi episode still defines the problem. It was not merely an allegation against one man. It was a live demonstration that there is no workable, independent, transparent mechanism when the allegation reaches the Chief Justice of India. The court that tells every other workplace in India how to handle sexual harassment could not, or would not, apply the same standard to itself.
Jaising has been saying this for two decades—in the 2003 petition, in the Ganguly intern’s affidavit, in the MP judge’s long fight, in her open letter on sexist courtroom language, and again in September 2026. The facts have not been hidden. They have been processed, sealed, and declared closed.
An institution that cannot look its own women judges and staff in the eye without reaching for confidentiality and hierarchy has already answered the question it pretends is still open: who watches the watchmen? In practice, they watch each other. And the public is told to trust the robes.
That trust is not an entitlement. On this record, it has been repeatedly, and quite deliberately, squandered.
