Partha Chatterjee, a social science scholar who was named in the law student Raya Sarkar's list of alleged sexual harassers, has declared that there has never been a single complaint of sexual harassment against him.
The well-known social scientist and historian while questioning the way in which his name has been entered has asked that the nature of the said allegation should be made known to him so that he can make a specific response to it.
In the full statement which is published by The Wire, Chatterjee also questions the number of instances where his name is mentioned. He says, "I find that my name occurs twice in that list.
In the first instance, my institution is named as the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, with the figure 1 under the column “Number of victims”; the rest of the columns including “Description of complaint” and “Year of violence” are blank. The second entry mentions my institution as Columbia University with the “Number of victims” column left blank. It is unclear why the second entry appears on the list."
The well-known social science scientist and historian has also claimed that there has never been a single complaint of sexual harassment made against him in 44 years of his association with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences and he has never been involved in any such incident.
"I believe it is fair for me to demand that the nature of the allegation against me be made known to me so that I could make a specific response to it. Otherwise, I demand that my name be removed from the list," writes Partha.
Meanwhile, in response to Partha Chatterjee's statement, Raya Sarkar took to Facebook on Tuesday and clarified that she wasn't the one updating the spreadsheet that named the alleged sexual harassers."I deleted the spreadsheet since then because it is an unsecure way to report as google docs can be hacked easily," says Sarkar in the post. Currently, only the cases vetted by Raya Sarkar have been listed by her on her Facebook as of now.