Fallen victim to another mansplaining incident, an assistant professor had to resign from her job at St Xavier's last year for posting photos in a swimsuit on her personal Instagram account. Now the teacher has been slapped with a defamation notice by the university authorities demanding damage compensation of Rs 99 crore.
The incident happened in October last year after the father of a student complained to the university authorities that he caught his son engrossed in the swimsuit-clad pictures of the assistant professor.
In his complaint, the parent contended that it was "obscene, vulgar and improper for an 18-year-old student to see his professor dressed in scanty clothes exhibiting her body on a public platform".
Summoned for an explanation by the university authorities, the teacher said that under no circumstance any of her students could access those pictures which she posted on Instagram two months before she joined the university, as by then the pictures would have gone automatically to the trash section.
She argued that her Instagram profile was private and hence the pictures there cannot be viewed by anyone other than her followers. She also expressed apprehension that her Instagram profile might have been hacked.
However, the university authorities refused to accept her logic and she was given the option to resign or get terminated. After she resigned, she filed an FIR with the Kolkata Police claiming that her Instagram account might have been hacked.
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Meanwhile, she had also sent a letter to the university authorities through her lawyer asking for a copy of the complaint filed by the parent of the student.
In reply, the authorities slapped her with a counter legal notice claiming that her earlier legal notice was an 'ill-motivated', 'desperate' and 'dishonest' attempt to open a closed chapter, thus causing immense and irreparable damage to the image of the institute.
In that counter-legal notice, the university authorities also sought a damage compensation of Rs 99 crore.
Meanwhile, netizens in the city are divided over the development. While some have resorted to bashing the assistant professor on moral grounds, others have said that whatever one does beyond his or her professional arena is not the business of his or her employer.
This is not a first for Kolkata's St Xaviers, the institute in 2018 pinned notice at the girls' hostel seeking for the girls to wear 'decent' clothing. “Avoid wearing revealing and indecent dresses like too short pants from January 2018," read the notice.
The students were denied entry for wearing knee-length skirts, sleeveless tops and anything that didn't fit into the parameters of the gatekeeper.
If premium co-ed institutes like these deny offering a safe and holistic environment where the value of freedom of choice is offered under the conditions of gender specificity then can we really call ourselves a free democracy?
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