A student’s account of harassment by a trusted teacher has reopened questions about how Kashmir’s schools handle complaints when the accused is one of their own
The post appeared on social media on a Wednesday, written by a student at Radiant Public School in Srinagar’s Malla Bagh neighbourhood.
By Thursday morning, the school had fired a teacher, and police in the city had opened an inquiry.
The student’s account described a betrayal months in the making.
She wrote that after she was granted half-day leave from school, a male teacher, someone she trusted because her mother also taught at the school, offered to drop her home. She said she initially refused, but agreed after he insisted.
Instead of taking her home, she alleged, the teacher harassed her sexually inside the vehicle. She described freezing completely, unable to speak or move or push him away.
“My body went numb,” she wrote in a viral post, adding that she never consented and wanted only for the ordeal to end.
What followed, according to the student, compounded the harm.
“I reported the incident to school authorities, but felt dismissed,” she noted. “The teacher was suspended for a matter of days before returning to the classroom, with administrators telling me he would simply be moved to a different building.”
The response left her feeling, in her words, neither safe nor heard.
She explained that she chose to go public to shield other students from the same experience. “I do not want anyone else to endure what I had endured.”
The case has left the school facing a challenge many institutions around the world have faced when the accused is one of their own and the institution’s reputation is on the line.
Radiant Public School’s Academic Head, Sheema, told Free Press Kashmir that management learned of the allegation only on Wednesday and moved immediately.
“We came to know about the incident yesterday,” she said. “We immediately terminated the teacher and informed the concerned authority.”
Asked whether the student had received counseling, Sheema said the school does have a counsellor available, but noted the student hadn’t come to school on Thursday.
The timeline itself has become part of the story.
Police confirmed the school approached them Thursday morning, asking them to look into an incident the student says occurred months earlier.
A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the school has filed no formal complaint or First Information Report. “It simply passed along the allegation and asked investigators to examine it,” the official told FPK.
The disparity between the alleged incident and the school’s outreach to police is now itself part of what investigators are examining.
“Police will investigate the allegations and record the victim’s statement,” the official said. “If the allegations are found to be true, appropriate legal action will be taken against the accused.”
For now, the case rests on the student’s account, the school’s alleged reversal from reassignment to dismissal, and a police investigation still in its early stages.
But the case impact has already reached beyond one campus in Kashmir.
Schools are again facing scrutiny over how they handle allegations against teachers and why serious complaints so often fall short of accountability.
The student’s public post has changed that, and turned an internal complaint into a case neither the school nor the police could ignore.
Whether it brings justice remains to be seen. But what is already clear is that it took a student’s voice, not the system meant to protect her, to force action.
