By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 2 2005 (IPS)

Court-martials do not normally make news in India, but the case of Flight Officer Anjali Gupta seems to be an exception. This is the first time a female armed forces officer is in the dock and her defence could severely dent the image of the Indian Air Force in what has been dubbed as the country’s own ‘Tailhook’ scandal.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) has filed charges of insubordination and financial impropriety under the Air Force Act against Gupta, while she in turn has claimed in her defence that she was a victim of sexual harassment in the IAF.

Her family says the court martial was a result of a complaint Gupta registered with the police in Bangalore. The New Delhi-based family, meanwhile, has threatened to drag the case to the civil courts if the military tribunal finds her guilty, saying she was being illegally held in custody.

”She stood up for her rights and went to the police. If that is being interpreted as an attitude problem, does that warrant a court martial?” Gupta’s sister Alka Garg asked reporters.

On Monday, a court of inquiry in Bangalore began looking into the sexual harassment charges levelled by Gupta against her three superior officers, as demanded by the autonomous Karnataka State Commission for Women. The trial comes after the March dismissal of three female air force cadets who made allegations of sexual harassment against a senior instructor at the IAF’s academy.

The court headed by Air Vice Marshal V M Iyer, along with four officers, including two women, began ”assessing” the relevant documents, an IAF spokesman said. This court of inquiry is separate from the court martial but its outcome will be significant to Gupta’s defence.

Gupta’s case is threatening to be an Indian ‘Tailhook’ scandal, where in 1991 dozens of women in the United States complained they were groped or assaulted by drunken pilots at a U.S. Navy booster group’s convention. The scandal rocked the U.S. Navy and its leadership.

The court-martial has infuriated women’s rights groups and now they are clamouring for stringent action and quick enactment of overdue legislation to protect women entering professions long dominated by males.

But this has alarmed legal circles, who want the case settled through legal channels rather than it having an extra-judiciary outcome.

”Women’s rights groups and media could be interfering with the legal process and end up damaging real public interests and the organisation that she (Gupta) is working for,” said Sudha Gupta, a Supreme Court advocate in an interview with IPS.

News reporters and television cameramen have been thronging Gupta’s home in the Indian capital where her sister and other immediate relatives have been giving interviews alleging that the woman officer had indeed been subject to sexual harassment and airing doubts as to whether she would get a fair trial.

The adverse publicity compelled Air Force Chief S.P. Tyagi to announce on Apr. 26 that he would ensure protection for Gupta. ”There are 600 woman officers in the IAF and my prime duty is to ensure that any complaint from a woman officer is looked into in a just manner,” Tyagi told journalists.

All-in-all, the IAF got more than it bargained for by charging Gupta with financial irregularities which turned out to be a few hundred dollars worth of personal travel claims that she apparently made while hitching rides on air force planes – as airmen routinely do in a country regarded as the original home of Catch 22-style misuse of public assets.

Indeed Gupta’s troubles, according to her representations, originate from her refusal to cooperate with a recruitment racket in which the same officers she accuses of sexual harassment, tried to get her to extract bribes from candidates looking for jobs as cooks and waiters in the air force.

To the discomfiture of the IAF, Gupta’s case has brought on a revisit of a ‘sex-for-stripes’ scandal in March when three woman cadets claimed that an instructor had threatened to fail them unless they submitted to demands for sex.

All three cadets were thrown out of the IAF academy in Hyderabad weeks before they were due to graduate and an independent inquiry into the incident, still underway, was ordered only as a result of loud protests from women’s rights groups.

Since the formerly all-male IAF began recruiting women a decade ago, the strength of women in the air force, which operates 1,200 aircraft, has steadily grown to 600. A third of these female personnel are pilots flying transport carriers and helicopters. Nonetheless, IAF policy still excludes them from combat duty.

But sexual harassment in the circles of India’s security forces is not something new.

A celebrated case, was one brought by Rupan Deol Bajaj, an administrator in western Punjab, against K.P.S. Gill, Punjab’s former maverick police chief. Bajaj fought an eight- year legal battle to get Gill convicted for slapping her on the bottom.

Gill, credited with pacifying Sikh militancy in Punjab state in the early 1990s through a ‘bullet-for-bullet’ policy was handed a three-month jail sentence. But he escaped being locked up because he would have needed a high-security prison in order for him not to be killed by jailed Sikh militants.

Bajaj’s lawyer Indira Jaising said afterwards that she got to grips with societal attitudes to sexual harassment during the prolonged case when Gill, often referred to as ‘supercop’ for his Punjab record, seemed to be able to swing greater public sympathy than her client.

Gill’s conviction went a long way in shattering the public belief that sexual harassment is socially acceptable and immune from legal action, although the vast majority of cases still go unreported because of social stigma attached to the victim rather than the perpetrator.

One recent case that did evoke public outrage against the perpetrator was the Apr. 21 rape of a 16-year-old teenager by a constable at a police post on the fashionable Marine Drive in the port city of Mumbai after he illegally detained her and chased away her male friends.

Public protests and demonstrations ensured that the constable, Sunil More, was sacked from service and placed under arrest. The police establishment was reduced to fending off charges that the security force in India’s commercial capital was corrupt and predatory and, far from helping citizens in trouble, a real menace.

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