Harassment allegation against top official lands on first lady’s table

ISLAMABAD: A senior woman officer has allegedly been harassed by her boss in one of the country’s top constitutional offices, the HUM Investigation Team (HIT) has learnt.

Following a weeks-long investigation, verified through multiple sources, HIT learnt that a BS-21 officer wrote to Pakistan’s First Lady Aseefa Bhutto Zardari, seeking her intervention against a grade-22 officer who, she alleges, harassed her multiple times, making her life “miserable” at the secretariat.

“…To my utter shock… [the secretary] threw the file at me, which landed behind my chair. He then irrationally started blaming me for siding with the accused DG’s stance…. I felt thoroughly insulted, as the secretary’s hostile behaviour was publicly demeaning and intimidating in the presence of my juniors. I did not misbehave or retort, but simply left his room. Later, the additional secretary called me to her office and conveyed that the secretary thinks I should consider resigning after this ‘beizzati’,” stated a memo sent by the aggrieved lady officer and seen by HIT.

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The lady officer wrote that after her initial shock subsided, she tried to rationalise the incident, assuming the secretary may have been in a bad mood or under stress. However, weeks later, she still awaited an apology. “On the contrary,” she wrote, “he was reported crowing in a tone of gloating satisfaction to my juniors on what he had done.”

She said that three weeks after the incident, the secretary called her to his office and told her that he had never acted in such a way before, but that she had “enraged and driven him” to do so.

“To add insult to injury, a plethora of explanations have been issued to me over trivial matters that have nothing to do with me, trying to make me a scapegoat for issues in the secretariat. The latest explanation — copy enclosed — contains the secretary’s own signed admission that the incident occurred, though I dispute his version,” she wrote.

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The officer added that the secretary had “no tolerance for dissenting views” and that reporting the matter to the harassment ombudsman might “bring a bad name” to the institution. She appealed to the First Lady for redress, warning that ignoring such behaviour would set a dangerous precedent for junior female officers.

HIT also obtained a note, purportedly from the secretary, in which he wrote: “Due to your nonchalant attitude, you compelled me — first and last time in my service — to raise my tone before a female officer. It was a trivial matter but you made it so important that I had to come to your room… I threw that file on television. Later, I apologised — in front of Ms… — thrice, telling you that I consider you as an elder sister, for a bit raising my tone because it was never done throughout my service.”

HIT wrote to the secretary, the alleged harasser, and senior members of the President’s Office for comment on the officer’s plea. They neither responded nor denied that such an incident had taken place at the country’s key constitutional office.