‘Delightful’ word may be sexually coloured, says SC

NEW DELHI: “Every day is a matter of learning,” said the Supreme Court realizing and learning from a male advocate’s remark that he found it ‘delightful’ to be repeatedly interrupted during his arguments by a woman lawyer.
This realization dawned on the court during the hearing of a petition filed by a former Gwalior additional district Judge, who had challenged the in-house inquiry committee set by the Madhya Pradesh high court Chief Justice to probe her sexual harassment complaint against a sitting HC Judge.
The sequence of events unfolded like this. When the counsel for the HC was advancing his arguments, the counsel for the petitioner interjected repeatedly to express her views.
When the bench told the HC counsel to go on with his arguments unmindful of the repeated interjections, the counsel in a lighter vein remarked: “The interjections by the senior counsel for the petitioner are always delightful.”
The petitioner’s counsel immediately took serious objection to the term ‘delightful” used with reference to her. She questioned the use of the term by asking the HC counsel whether similar interjections by men were also considered by him as ‘delightful’. If not, then why her interjections were found delightful, she asked and went on to describe the HC counsel’s observations as ‘sexually coloured’.
The bench considered the lighter vein comment and the serious objections raised against it by the petitioner’s counsel and came to the conclusion that “she may well be right”.
“There is a lot to learn from what she innocuously conveyed. Her sensitivity to the issue, one may confess, brought out to us, a wholly different understanding of the subject. It is, therefore, that we have remarked above, that the evaluation of a charge of sexual harassment would depend on the manner in which it is perceived,” said a bench of Justices J S Khehar and Arun Mishra.
“Each case will have to be decided on its own merits. Whether the perception of the harassed individual was conveyed to the person accused would be very material in a case falling in the realm of over-sensitivity,” the bench said.
“In that, it would not be open to him thereafter, to defend himself by projecting that he had not sexually harassed the person concerned, because his understanding of the alleged action was unoffending,” the bench warned.
Justice Khehar, writing the judgment for the bench, said: “The issue of sexual harassment has a variety of fine connotations. Its evaluation may sometimes depend upon the sensitivity of the person concerned. And also whether, the perception of the harassed individual was known to the one against whom the accusing finger is pointed.”