An allegation of sexual harassment in the workplace, whether or not the complaint is "engineered", needs to be investigated first. This is urgent when the accused is powerful, such as the governor of West Bengal, and the accuser is a contractual member of staff in the Raj Bhavan. The blanket resistance offered by the governor, C.V. Ananda Bose, to the police investigation, with instructions to his staff to bar the premises to the police and not to cooperate with them by any means, has created an impasse. Mr Bose gave his immunity as governor enshrined in Article 361 of the Constitution as reason for his adamant stance. It is being argued by some experts that the immunity is from legal proceedings and court cases and not from investigation. Be that as it may, it still behoves him to allow the investigation if only to clear the air since he declared that the complaint was engineered. Instead, Mr Bose has intensified his hostility with the state government by exhibiting an allegedly edited video to 100 persons barring Mamata Banerjee and the police. That did not show any of the areas mentioned by the complainant and was frankly pointless. Another, more extended, video that the police claim to have collected confirms certain peripheral details of the complaint without being conclusive either way.

But the governor’s video has revealed the identity of the complainant, which is against the law. She has demanded that he be penalised for this; in any case, she said she felt suicidal. Irrespective of the status of her complaint, her dignity and self-respect have certainly been compromised. Besides, the woman has become unimportant in the political storm the event has unleashed; Raj Bhavan has pointed out that it occurred just when the prime minister was coming to the city for his election campaign. In this view, she is just a pawn. If it is a political conspiracy, as the governor claims, it would be easiest to dispose of it by exposing the falsehoods. But his actions have added fuel to the chief minister’s attacks against him. The situation is sad and ugly. No investigation would look impartial in these circumstances. Laws do not change the self-absorption of power or the single-mindedness of politicians, while the issue, especially when it has to do with women, vanishes.