Senior doctor accused of harassment

Victims send complaint letters to Sindh health minister

HYDRABAD:

A female doctor and some other female health workers have accused a senior health official in Hyderabad, Dr Santosh Kumar, of sexual harassment in their separate letters addressed to the Sindh Health minister Azra Fazl Pechuho.

They have urged the minister to direct deputy commissioner Hyderabad to conduct an impartial inquiry against the doctor on the basis of their allegations.

Dr Kumar, who has also been booked in a FIR on November 23 at Qasimabad police station on a complaint of one of the doctors, previously worked as Covid-19 Consultant of the World Health Organisation. But he was removed from the job after the harassment allegations surfaced. He was arrested and later released on bail.

However, when The Express Tribune contacted Dr Kumar, he refused to comment on the development.

Meanwhile the alleged harassment victim claimed that Dr Kumar carried out a liable and slander campaign against her.

"[Dr Kumar] sent an [anonymous] letter to Hyderabad commissioner, DC, SSP, and IGP Sindh to defame me," stated the alleged harassment victim, who is currently working for the WHO, in her letter to the minister.

"The letter contained extremely malicious allegations against me, my husband and my family. My name and my apartment's address were also mentioned in the text," she said.

According to her, the same defamatory letter was also circulated on social media. After a few days of investigation, the doctor and her husband found, with the help of a CCTV camera at the office of a private courier company, that Dr Kumar's driver had dispatched the letters to the district administration and the police officials.

Subsequently, an FIR was lodged at Qasimabad police station nominating Dr Kumar and his driver Dost Muhammad under sections 496-C and 384 of Pakistan Penal Code. The former section pertains to levelling false charges of fornication, punishable with up to five years if convicted, and the latter for extortion.

The complainant claimed that she was also blackmailed to pay the accused doctors Rs2 million if she wanted him to stop slinging mud on her character through similar correspondence and the social media. "Although I have taken the matter to the court [by registering FIR], I request you to direct the DC Hyderabad to conduct an inquiry at the earliest," the doctor wrote in her letter to the minister.

A polio worker, in another letter dated December 8, urged the minister to give her justice by ordering an impartial inquiry against Dr Kumar whom she blamed for harassment. She recalled that in 2017 she was pregnant with three months when Dr Kumar subjected her to harassment.

"Dr Santosh threatened me and my husband in different ways. One night he came to our residence and fired aerial shots after which our landlord forced us to vacate our residence." She alleged that she lost her pregnancy due to the mental stress inflicted by that doctor.

The All Lady Health Workers Programme Union in their letter to the health minister complained that a group of doctors and other health workers subjected female health workers to harassment and blackmailing. They said that they have been recording such incidents since 2016.

The union noted that though the WHO immediately removed Dr Kumar on the basis of harassment complaints, he continued to work for the Sindh health department. "We hope that being a woman [health minister] you can better understand the ordeal which the health workers have been going through. We hope that you will find some lasting solution to this problem of harassment [in the health department] so that female doctors and other staff can work in a respectable manner."

Published in The Express Tribune, December 11^th, 2021.