After the comedy group, All India Bakchod was exposed to indulging a colleague who was making uninvited sexual advances and harassment, more and more women are coming forward with their own stories about sexual harassment from high and mighty. And this has started a cascading effect when one woman narrates her story, others reply to her with their own stories, many of them preferring to remain anonymous and taking the Direct Message route to tell their story.
Exactly this has happened after writer and journalist Sandhya Menon narrated her encounter with three senior journalists in three different organisations, other women started replying to her with similar incidents that had happened with them.
One of such incidents involves a very high profile person, a retired High Court judge. According to one anonymous woman who narrated her story to Sandhya Menon, once she faced such behaviour from justice Kolse Patil, a retired judge of Bombay High Court. The lady in question had gone to Patil’s house to record an interview with him. The interview was recorded inside the house as there were lots of noise outside. At the end of the interview, he asked the woman why the top button of her kurta is open and said that he thought they can be ‘friends’.
A high court judge pic.twitter.com/wiatywrHR9
— Sandhya Menon (@TheRestlessQuil) October 5, 2018
It can be noted that justice Patil was one of the organisers of Elgar Parishad which was held in Maharashtra last year, which led to the Bhima Koregaon riots. Commenting on the arrest of ‘urban naxals’ by Pune police in relation to the Bhima Koregaon violence and plot to kill PM, he has said that the allegations are false and arrests were made to stifle dissent.
Justice Patil is also known for his anti-Hindu and casteist speeches. In one such speech in 2016, he has alleged that RSS is spreading Hindu terror. In another speech he had said that ‘RSS is the biggest enemy of India, we need to defeat the poisonous ideology of RSS on the ideological level’. He also had mentioned that ‘Hindutva is nothing but deluding name of Brahmanism and the real enemy of India are Brahmanism and Capitalism’. He also has a problem with the word Hindustan, as according to him it refers to Hindus only and all Indians are not Hindus.
He has even made an outrageous allegation that RSS has taken money from Pakistan’s ISI. Attending an event of Islamist fundamentalist Popular Front of India (PFI), he had insinuated that RSS chief la Mohan Bhagwat received ₹24 lakh to destabilise India, saying that ‘Brahmin-wadi’ people are dividing Hinduism.
