When history-sheeters rush to police stations after assaulting people to file false complaints against victims of their own violence so as to counter the charges against them, the police know it is part of the underworld script.
But when L S Ganesh, Dean of Students of IIT Madras, openly declared in the presence of the Joint Commissioner of Police at the Kotturpuram police station on Wednesday that he would make three girls of his institute file a police complaint, accusing New Indian Express photographer Albin Mathew of assaulting them, it only sounds more sinister.
Ganesh, who spoke to me on Tuesday night over phone after Albin was assaulted by fellow professor Prakash M Maiya on the IIT campus, wanted to settle the dispute amicably. But his tone and tenor changed a day later, when news photographers insisted that the police investigate the incident.
Perhaps he was emboldened by the fact that some faculty members and a few students had by then threatened to “lodge a complaint against the unethical behaviour of the photo-journalist concerned”. By doing so, he added insult to the injury Albin suffered on Tuesday while covering the suicide of an IIT-M student.
So, what did Albin do? He was merely discharging his professional responsibility at IIT-M. If some faculty members feel he had ignored their demands, let it be put on record that Albin was just doing his duty as a fearless news photographer.
Mediapersons often find themselves in hostile terrain while meeting people or reporting events or taking photographs. But hostility is not something you would associate with the hallowed precincts of an IIT, would you?
Albin happened to be the lone mediaperson on the campus at the moment when Prof Maiya assaulted him and then took the help of the security guards to detain him for an hour at a building.
Threatening to frame him up for ‘inappropriate pictures’ of women students is preposterous as Albin had handed over his camera to the police on Tuesday itself. Anyone who had any doubt in his mind could have checked the digital images within minutes.
Hence, IIT director Bhaskar Ramamurthi’s bid to defend the assault is clearly an afterthought. Ramamurthi claimed Maiya “was driven to act in the above manner, in order to stand up for the dignity, privacy and security of the lady students. It is not clear even upon reflection what else could have been done by our faculty members and students to prevent the photographer from violating the privacy of our lady students and from taking away the photographs.”
It is painful to note that the IIT top brass condones such behaviour. Manhandling a human being is not just a crime but also unbecoming a man of seeming erudition. If IIT-M had a problem, it could have contacted the Express editorial to complain about the photographer. Instead, a professor took the law into his hands and the faculty and a few students are unashamedly supporting him.
That the IIT-M has stooped to such abysmal depths is only an indicator of the rot that has set in on the campus. It is ironic that that the IIT director talks of media ethics. Is it ethical for professors to turn violent and threaten to book innocent persons on false charges?
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