Twenty-year-old Soumyasree Bisi can be seen dancing uninhibitedly to Odia pop music in an Instagram reel. In another video on her Insta handle, she praises a street vendor for his smiling disposition despite his hardships and urges everyone to learn this valuable life lesson from him.
Bisi was training to be a teacher and was pursuing a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) degree in Balasore town’s Fakir Mohan College in the eastern state of Odisha. She was politically active and a member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parish (ABVP), the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Outspoken and bold, she aspired to be president of the student union in her college.
On July 12, Bisi allegedly set herself on fire in front of the office of the college principal, Dilip Ghosh. Her complaints of sexual harassment against the head of the department, Samir Kumar Sahu, had been ignored, and instead, she was being threatened with disciplinary action. She sustained 95 percent burn injuries and died two days later. Police have arrested Sahu and Ghosh, the latter only after Bisi ’s death.
For over six months, Bisi alleged Sahu had been harassing her. She alleged that the department head had asked for “favors,” and then relentlessly targeted her for not complying by refusing to let her sit for exams, singling her out for punishment, and even publicly humiliating her.
The outspoken Bisi had approached every higher authority with her complaint. On June 30, she met the principal of her college and formally lodged a complaint. She then posted her official complaint on X on July 1, and tagged Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi, Union Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan, the National Commission of Women, and Balasore’s district commissioner, among others. But none paid heed.
Following her death, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who is the leader of the opposition in Parliament, posted on X that Bisi’s death was “not a suicide but a direct murder by the BJP system.” He pointed out that she repeatedly raised her voice against sexual harassment but was left without any institutional and administrative support.
India has enacted laws against sexual harassment. Under the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, or the PoSH Act, all educational institutions are mandated to constitute an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) to prevent and redress complaints of sexual harassment.
It has now come to light that it was only after Bisi met the principal and lodged her complaint that the college constituted an ICC on July 1.
Worse, when college authorities finally began an investigation into her complaint, it was nothing short of a witch-hunt that attempted to portray her as an irresponsible, even wayward girl. The inquiry was in all likelihood compromised. At the behest of the accused, several students targeted and harassed Bisi for making a “malicious complaint.”
Investigators say the day after the committee submitted its report on July 9, Ghosh, the college principal, accused Bisi of making a “false complaint” and threatened to bar her from exams if she did not apologize to Sahu. On July 12, he summoned her to his office and tried to broker a mediation with the accused teacher. When Bisi found Sahu sitting in the principal’s room, she stormed out.
With the long, harrowing nightmare showing no signs of ending, in an act of desperation, Bisi set herself on fire outside the principal’s office.
Pramila Swain, a member of a fact-finding team of women’s organizations investigating the complaint, told The Diplomat that “as head of the college’s teacher education department, Sahu wielded enormous power over the complainant’s future. He had the power to pass or fail her in her course.” Since he was also in a position to make or break the future of other students as well, he could goad them to mentally harass Bisi.
Swain claimed that there were several complaints of misdemeanors and misconduct against Sahu in his previous teaching stints in other colleges. In her view, the ICC botched the investigation. The college had never dealt with a sexual harassment complaint before. The accused teacher should have been sent on leave when the probe was on. But he brazenly continued to teach and enjoyed the confidence of the principal.
“Ghosh was only interested in hushing up the incident since he felt it was tarnishing the reputation of the college,” and was not inclined to seek justice for Bisi, Swain said. She holds the principal equally culpable for Bisi’s death.
A vivacious young woman, Bisi came from a modest background — her father was a college clerk and hailed from Palasia village. She moved to Balasore, a city two hours away from her hometown, for her education, and taught school students self-defense to support her own education. Her family was supportive of her, and in fact, when they got to know of the harassment she was facing, her father and brother too filed a complaint with the college.
Instead of paying heed to Bisi’s complaints, the college authorities advised her to refrain from “diversions,” such as creating social media content. Many ABVP activists did not approve of her making video reels. Bisi’s independent and uninhibited behavior was not perceived as socially appropriate for a woman; so when she spoke up about being sexually harassed, the authorities refused to believe her complaint.
The fact that a girl student had had the courage to speak out against harassment itself was unthinkable in the traditionally patriarchal social setup of Odisha. That she went public on the harassment by posting on social media raised the hackles of the authorities.
“The patriarchal social system did not want Soumyasree [Bisi] to raise her voice, and the college was an extension of that thinking,” Jayanti Dora, director of the School of Women Studies at Utkal University in Odisha, told The Diplomat, pointing out that “they failed her.”
Drawing attention to the larger issue of patriarchy, Dora said that educational institutions are not even aware of what constitutes sexual harassment and refuse to recognize it as such. The complaint committee had no training on dealing with the issue of sexual harassment. They were not well-versed in the law against sexual harassment and had no understanding of it, she said.
Sexual harassment includes not just overt sexual behavior but demands for sexual favors and behavior aimed at mentally harassing the victim.
This tragic incident exposes the dark side of the higher education boom in Odisha. Public and private educational institutions are mushrooming in the state. Both the authorities and students have little awareness of what constitutes sexual harassment or ways in which complaints can be redressed. Rarely are ICCs established, and even when they do, they exist merely on paper.
Sexual harassment and the lack of recourse drove Bisi to self-immolate. But this isn’t the first time that such harassment has led to suicide. There were two cases of Nepali students dying by suicide at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology campus in Odisha this year. An officially constituted University Grants Commission probe committee subsequently found that no action was taken on the complaints of sexual harassment leveled by one of the victims.
Several young girls confess that Soumyasree Bisi’s fate is a scary precedent for them since they have dared to pursue higher education and aspire to work outside the home, despite societal obstacles in a patriarchal society.
To set things right, all educational institutions must first recognize sexual harassment as a crime and create awareness about it on their campuses so that women students feel safe enough to speak up about it without fear or censure.
Failing that, women students’ enrolment in India’s higher educational institutions and women’s participation in the workforce will continue to stagnate.