ABC v. XYZ (2026): the POSH Act punishes a false complaint, but not the person who instigated it

A man against whom a sexual harassment complaint had been lodged, and then withdrawn, asked the Internal Complaints Committee to do two things: to record that the complaint was false, and to name the colleague who, he said, had put the complainant up to it. The Committee closed the inquiry but declined to name anyone, attributing the instigation to an "unknown source." On 20 April 2026, Dr. Neela Gokhale, J., sitting at the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court, drew a careful line between two different things the petitioner wanted — vindication and retribution. The statute, she held, could give him the first but not the second, and the Committee had erred only in the manner of the first: it had no business calling an instigator "unknown" when his name sat in plain view in the retraction letter on which the closure rested.

The facts in brief

A female employee lodged a complaint of sexual harassment at the workplace against the petitioner (anonymised throughout as ABC v. XYZ to protect the identities of those involved). Before the inquiry ran its course, the complainant retracted the allegation, sending the Internal Complaints Committee a letter withdrawing the complaint. Crucially, that retraction letter did more than withdraw — it identified, by name, the colleague whom the complainant said had instigated her to make the complaint in the first place.

The Committee closed the matter on the strength of the retraction. In its report, however, it recorded the source of instigation as "unknown." The petitioner, the man who had been complained against, was dissatisfied on two fronts. First, he wanted the Committee — and through it the employer — to take action against the person who had engineered a false and malicious complaint against him. Second, and more narrowly, he objected to the Committee's description of that person as "unknown," when the retraction letter the Committee itself relied upon named him squarely. The matter reached the High Court after the Industrial Tribunal had ruled, with the petitioner challenging the treatment of the instigation question.

The question

Two questions sat at the centre of the case. The first was a question of statutory reach: does the POSH Act, and in particular s.14, allow an Internal Committee or an employer to visit any consequence upon a person who instigates a woman to file a false complaint, as distinct from the woman (or person) who actually files it? The second was a question of administrative honesty in fact-finding: where a Committee closes a complaint on the basis of a retraction letter that names the instigator, can it simultaneously record in its report that the instigator is "unknown"?

What the Court held

On the first question, the Court read s.14 narrowly and textually. Section 14 is the provision that arms the Committee against false or malicious complaints — it permits a recommendation that action be taken against the woman or person who made the complaint, where the complaint is found to be malicious or the allegation knowingly false. But its reach stops at the complainant. As the Court put it, the statute:

The petitioner's demand for disciplinary action against the instigator under the POSH Act therefore had no statutory hook. A finding of malice, the Court was at pains to note, is in any event not lightly made: it requires independent, credible material, and the mere fact that a complaint is not substantiated does not, without more, convert it into a false or malicious one. The architecture of the Act — s.9 frames the complaint, s.14 guards against its abuse — simply does not extend a penal arm to instigators standing behind the complainant.

On the second question, however, the Court found that the Committee had overstepped in the opposite direction. Having relied on the retraction letter to close the case, the Committee could not pick and choose which parts of that letter to credit. The instigator was named in the document on which the closure was founded; to then call him "unknown" was an unsustainable selective omission. The Court held that:

The result was a split outcome that mapped onto the two questions. The petitioner could not have his instigator punished under the POSH Act — the statute simply did not provide for it. But he was entitled to an accurate record: the Committee's report was modified so that the named instigator appeared as such, rather than as an anonymous "unknown source," and the order under challenge was set aside to that extent.

Analysis

The judgment is best understood as a precise reading of a deliberately bounded provision. The POSH Act was built around the protection of the complainant, and s.14 is its narrow counterweight — a safeguard against the weaponisation of the complaint mechanism. The Supreme Court's enforcement audit in Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa underscored how cautiously the false-complaint power must be exercised, lest s.14 itself become a deterrent to genuine complainants. Read against that backdrop, Dr. Gokhale's refusal to stretch s.14 to reach instigators is faithful to the statute's design: the legislature penalised the act of making a false complaint, not the act of encouraging one, and a court cannot graft a new category of liability onto a penal provision by interpretation.

That restraint, though, is paired with a firm insistence on the integrity of the Committee's own reasoning. The "unknown source" finding was not a substantive over-reach but a kind of evasion — a refusal to record what the record plainly showed. The Court's logic here is an estoppel-flavoured one: a Committee that leans on a document to dispose of a case cannot disown the inconvenient contents of the same document. This dovetails with the broader jurisprudence policing the jurisdictional and procedural limits of Internal Committees, of which the Bombay High Court's own decision in Siddhesh Satpute v. State Bank of India — confining the Committee to matters that are genuinely within a statutory "workplace" — is a recent cousin. Both cases share a method: the Committee is a creature of the statute, and it may neither do less than the Act requires of its fact-finding nor more than the Act authorises by way of sanction.

The malice threshold the Court reaffirmed also matters. By holding that non-substantiation is not the same as falsity, the judgment guards the line that keeps s.14 from chilling complaints — a concern that animates the parallel debate over the misuse safeguards built around s.498-A IPC, where courts have repeatedly tried to deter abuse without disarming genuine victims.

Why it matters

For employers and the Internal Committees they constitute, the practical takeaways are concrete. First, there is no power under the POSH Act to recommend action against a third-party instigator, however clearly the instigation is established; any consequence for such a person must be sought, if at all, under the organisation's general service or disciplinary framework, or in another forum altogether — not under the POSH machinery. Second, a Committee that closes a complaint on a retraction must record the contents of that retraction faithfully; selectively omitting a named individual to spare embarrassment, or to avoid awkward findings, will not survive scrutiny.

For respondents who believe they have been falsely accused, the judgment is a measured one. It vindicates the right to an accurate record and confirms that a malicious complaint can attract consequences for the complainant under s.14 — but it forecloses the use of the POSH forum as an instrument to punish the people perceived to be behind the complaint. And for everyone working within the Act, it reinforces the central discipline of POSH adjudication: the Committee must stay inside the statute's lines, neither inventing penal powers it does not have nor flinching from findings the evidence compels.

Related on Valkya

• Aureliano Fernandes v. State of Goa: the POSH enforcement audit, ten years after the statute
• Siddhesh Satpute v. State Bank of India (2026): a shared autorickshaw is not a 'workplace' under the POSH Act
• Rajesh Sharma v. State of U.P.: Section 498-A safeguards and their withdrawal in Social Action Forum

Sources

• Verdictum, "ICC Cannot Label Instigator Of False Sexual Harassment Complaint Under POSH Act As 'Unknown' When Identity Is Disclosed: Bombay High Court"
• LiveLaw, "POSH Act Can Penalise A Woman For Filing False Complaint But Not Someone Who 'Instigates' Her To Lodge It: Bombay High Court"