NEW DELHI: That something amiss with our elite external intelligence agency RAW again came to the fore with the Haryana police arresting one of its senior officer Nisha Priya Bhatia on charges of harassing her colleagues and neighbours.
Working as a language director in RAW’s training centre at Gurgaon, a satellite town near Delhi, Nisha, at the behest of complaints by his senior Uma Shankar Narayan Mishra and neighbours, was charged under the IPC sections relating to house trespass in order to commit offence punishable with imprisonment, public nuisance, mischief and punishment for voluntarily causing hurt.
Nisha was in the news in August last year when she tried to commit suicide by consuming poison before the Prime Minister’s office in Delhi. Nisha had said then that she was forced into the drastic act because no action was taken against her male colleagues, who sexually harassed her, and she was not allowed to even meet the Prime Minister.
The state of rot in the agency can be gauged from what Nisha had alleged then. Blaming RAW chief Ashok Chaturvedi for scuttling her repeated pleas for an inquiry into the sexual harassment charges, she had even charged Chaturvedi for using vulgar language to get sexual favour from her.
Earlier in 2007 also, she had lodged a complaint against a joint secretary, accusing him of sexually harassing her. According to her statement, Sunil Uke, a joint secretary level officer of the agency, had offered her around Rs 30,000 in August to spend a night with him in a hotel.