Why Bengal should take a cue from Russia on teachers in swimsuits

The facts of the case –at least as far as the public knows –are mindboggling. A private autonomous university in Kolkata apparently willing to fork out Rs 10 crore (Rs 9.9 crore, to be precise) to file a Rs 99 crore defamation suit against a former assistant professor who had worked there for less than three months. That is how much court fees are -- 10 per cent of the amount sought as damages. So the former junior academic’s transgressions must be pretty egregious.

But are they? She had posted photos of herself in a “swimsuit” and gym clothes in a story on her private Instagram account a couple of months before she even joined the university. So the photos should have disappeared in a day. Instead, a male student’s father caught him looking at them months later and complained to the university authorities, who hauled the teacher up before a panel. She was shown the photograph, criticised, questioned and forced to resign.

She filed a complaint a few days after resigning — back in October — about how the photos were leaked and distributed but waited in vain for the Kolkata Police to investigate and lodge an FIR. Finally, in March she sent a legal notice to her former employers, and they retaliated with a demand that she apologise or face a Rs 99 crore defamation suit. Suddenly, after an amazing 10 months, this incident has emerged in the public domain. But why did it take so long to come out?

There are question marks over the behaviour of so many of the cast of characters in this sordid blackboard saga: the voyeuristic student, his self-righteous father, the sanctimonious university authorities who interrogated the teacher, the not-so-curiously lackadaisical Kolkata Police officials and, last but not least the West Bengal media that mysteriously did not get wind of this matter all this while. And after the news broke, the silence of Bengal’s ‘liberals’ is inexplicable too.

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The student was probably not the only one to see those shadily obtained and distributed private photos, yet no one else red-flagged the matter. A strange complicity. None of the students felt anything was amiss either when their teacher suddenly upped and left a bare three months after joining. Or did they all feel it was the right thing to do: fire a teacher for something she did in her free time and on a private platform? Could Bengal’s Generation Z be so antediluvian?

The student’s father lives in a time warp. He thinks his college-going son had never seen bikini-clad women until those leaked photos and innocently believed till that fateful moment that female teachers had no life beyond college. The father—an alumnus of the original ‘prestigious’ college, not the newer university, just like the assistant professor—presumably also believes workwear for female academics (and leisurewear too) have not changed since the 20^th century.

The university authorities are obviously on the same page as the father. In fact, they are probably stuck in the mid-20^th century, not even in its last decade. They thought this working woman with a doctorate should have consulted her mother before wearing swimsuits—a bikini or onesie. In a state, city and society that prides itself in being ‘progressive’ and pro-women, this bizarrely Victorian stance of one of its most coveted educational institutions is very hard to swallow.

Even harder to comprehend is the silence of the people who tomtom those very aspects of Bengali society that set it apart from the supposedly regressive north India. Ordinary citizens—many of them parents—have been outraged by the young teacher's ordeal but the doyens (and doyennes) of West Bengal’s society and polity have been curiously reticent. They have neither demanded an explanation from the college about its actions nor voiced support for the teacher.

The inaction of the Kolkata Police since last October is not hard to understand, though. Ten years ago, when the late Suzette Jordan tried to lodge her complaint about being gangraped in a car by four men on Park St, the local police laughed her off. It took a media storm for them to investigate the case, and the female officer who cracked it was transferred out. Calumny against Jordan came from all quarters, showing the seamy underside of Kolkata ‘bhadralok’ society.

When Kolkata’s society once again appears to be unsympathetic to the plight of a woman, a sacked teacher—one legally appointed that too, not through the scam-tainted process currently claiming scalps among politicians and officials—the police cannot be expected to be pro-active. Despite this happening in a university linked to a college attended by so many of the city’s luminaries and their progeny, the 10-month total black-out about this incident seems even more unnatural.

How was the media unaware of the goings-on at the university? In my day, university and crime reporters had their ears to the ground; today they evidently depend on handouts. So Kolkata Police had no pressure to investigate the assistant professor’s complaint. Even a letter from the National Commission of Women was easily ignored, presumably because their boss has indicated her appreciation of those government officials who cock a snook at queries from New Delhi.

The most curious of all, though, is the Rs 99 crore suit that the university is threatening the sacked academic professor with. At one level, this eye-watering amount indicates the university admits its ‘image’ has taken a beating by this incident coming out. At another level, it also points to very deep pockets, though as a trust-administered institution, its governing body should ideally be spending such vast sums of money on more, well, Christian good deeds.

Interestingly, in 2019, a teacher of literature in the Siberian city of Barnaul was sacked for photos on social media of her in a swimsuit and a mini dress. It all sounds eerily similar. There too a parent—a mother—complained to the principal about those photos, who in turn demanded the teacher should resign, on the grounds that she had dressed up “like a prostitute”. But the reaction was markedly different from what has been happening in progressive Kolkata.

In solidarity teachers from all over Russia uploaded 15,000 photos on social media of themselves in swimsuits—most of them far more revealing than what the Siberian teacher was sacked for—with the hashtag #TeachersArePeopleToo. That prompted the education minister to offer her a new job in a training college: to formulate a course on the “risks and positive sides of communicating on social media” for teachers, students, and parents. Bengal should follow suit.

The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed are personal.

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