In a small chamber that overlooks the district and sessions court in Nashik, Baba Sayyed, 57 and Rahul Kasliwal, 45, are grappling with the most high-profile case of their careers.
The two lawyers, partners and close friends for 25 years, are representing all but two of the accused in the TCS BPO case where eight employees — six men and two women — have been booked variously for rape, sexual harassment, harassment, and religious coercion. Except for one of them, Nida Khan, 26, the rest of the accused are in jail.
The case, first reported by the media on April 9, has convulsed Nashik, cast aspersions on one of the country’s largest IT companies, and raised questions about media overreach, HR redressal mechanisms, and the investigation itself.
What TCS said
In a statement issued onApril17, TCS CEO and MD K Krithivasan, said, “TCS holds itself to the highest standards of employee welfare and institutional conduct. We remain fully committed to the safety, dignity, and wellbeing of every employee…we have a zero-tolerance policy towards any form of coercion or misconduct. We are focused on supporting our employees and ensuring a safe and respectful workplace across all our locations. We continue to extend full cooperation to the law enforcement agencies so that the matter is investigated thoroughly, transparently and brought to a rightful conclusion.”
Origins
The case seemingly began with a love affair gone sour. On March 26, four days after Eid, the family of a 23-year-old employee at the TCS BPO approached Devlali police station to complain that she had begun fasting during Ramadan, and had taken to wearing the hijab, causing consternation and alarm within the staunchly Hindu family. Her kin told the police that when they confronted her, the woman confessed to being in love with her colleague at the BPO, Danish Shaikh, 31, and that he had promised to marry her.
Nashik commissioner of police Sandeep Karnik was quick to gauge the import of the complaint, and act. “Since she was afraid to lodge a complaint, our team reached out to her and gave her the courage to do it,” Karnik told HT.
Charges
Shaikh was booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) including section 69 (sexual intercourse obtained through false promise to marry), 75 (sexual harassment), 299 (insulting religion or religious belief), and 3(5) (constructive or joint liability).
In her complaint, the woman said that in February, she received a message from a woman called Mehreen who identified herself as Danish’s wife and said that the couple had two children. When the woman confronted Danish, he told her that he had never been interested in marrying her. It is not clear why the woman didn’t approach the police immediately, and instead started observing a fast during Ramadan.
Just a week prior to the woman’s complaint, the Nashik police commissioner made headlines with the arrest of the politically well-connected godman Ashok Kharat in a rape case. Within three days of Kharat’s arrest, CM Devendra Fadnavis set up an SIT under SRPF commandant Tejaswi Satpute, transferring all Kharat-related investigations to her.
Taking a cue, Karnik also set up an SIT under ACP Sandeep Mitke. They decided to send undercover operatives to investigate the alleged goings-on at the BPO. Nashik city police officers told the media, including this newspaper, that a team of six women officers was sent to the BPO posing as housekeeping staff through a third-party vendor without informing TCS authorities.
BPO was a ‘high-security zone’
People familiar with the matter at the BPO, however, told HT that the BPO is a “high-security zone” and entry is possible only through an access card, which has to be swiped twice: once to enter the lobby, common areas, etc., and again to enter the Offshore Delivery Centre (ODC) where most of the accused and the complainants worked. This area is partitioned from the rest of the office with frosted glass doors. Only people who worked in the ODC were given access to it. “It’s hard to fathom how undercover police officers could have entered the BPO,” one of the persons said, adding that any housekeeping and cleaning staff would likely get entry when the ODC was relatively empty between shifts.
When contacted about the police’s account of undercover operatives, a TCS spokesperson said they were “constrained on offering comments on specific queries as these are matters of present investigation.”
The BPO employs around 170 people. Within a week of the first FIR, police filed eight more against seven employees, arresting six. They included two team leads, Tausif Bilal Attar, 37 and Raza Memon, 35. Two others arrested were Shafi Shaikh, 36, a business process analyst, and Shahrukh Husain Qureshi, 34, an associate. All had been working at TCS since 2017. Ashwini Chainani, 52, a senior official based in Pune, was arrested on April 10. The other female accused, Nida Khan, who joined in 2021, is absconding. Her anticipatory bail plea will be heard on April 27.
Both Chainani and Khan were widely described as HR personnel, which is not the case. The Nashik BPO has a full-time HR manager.
No POSH complaints?
The big question that remains: What changed at the BPO between 2022 and March 2026 – when the alleged incidents of harassment happened – given that several accused have been working there since 2017?
According to people familiar with the facility, the office is an open-plan workspace with common areas under CCTV surveillance, though the main delivery centre does not have cameras due to data privacy concerns. Employees deposit their phones before entering. “It would be difficult to overlook misconduct in such a setting,” one person said.
Police allege that despite working in different teams and shifts, the accused acted in concert to create an environment of coercion and harassment, and that complaints went unaddressed. One unaddressed complaint led to Chainani’s arrest.
To add to Chainani’s woes, TCS in its statement clarified that Nida Khan was a junior employee who was not part of the HR department, but did not mention Chainani. Her lawyer Mayur Deshpande points to the company’s statement that it had not received any complaints under POSH, to defend his client. In her police statement, one of the complainants said she had informed two superiors at the Nashik BPO about harassment before verbally mentioning it to Chainani. “Those two have not been charged,” Deshpande pointed out. When asked about Chainani’s role, a TCS spokesperson offered no comment and reiterated the April 17 statement which said it has engaged Deloitte and law firm Trilegal to support an internal probe. The people familiar with the matter at the BPO told HT that the company had clarified Nida Khan’s position because of attacks she was under, and omission of Chainani’s name did not mean that she was culpable.
In her statement to the SIT on March 31, days prior to her arrest, Chainani told the police that after Danish Shaikh’s arrest, she had encouraged the women in the BPO to speak to the police freely.
What FIRs say
In seven of the nine FIRs, the complainants are junior employees aged between 23 and 25; in the eighth one the complainant is a 36-year-old Hindu woman, a senior employee. As part of her complaint, she has alleged that one of the accused told her to contact a maulvi in Ajmer for help when they were discussing her childlessness, a comment which left her “deeply uncomfortable”.
Most of the complainants have alleged that these incidents of harassment happened between 2022 and March 2026. The charges range from the accused males asking them questions about their personal lives, making inappropriate and offensive comments about their bodies, staring at them “with bad intention”, using sexual innuendo in conversations, and in some cases touching them inappropriately. Many of them said that the men made them feel uncomfortable by commenting on their attire when they came to the office dressed in sarees or new clothes for Gudi Padwa (Maharashtrian new year) on March 19, a week before the first FIR was registered against Danish Shaikh and two others
One woman complainant, 25, told the police that one of the accused, Tausif Attar, was a habitual offender making sexually-loaded remarks. “But since our seniors never took action against him, I was sure that even if I complained no action would be taken.”
“The complainants came from humble homes. They were scared of losing their jobs if they complained,” said an SIT officer. In addition to allegations of sexual harassment, three of the women told the police that the accused men and Nida Khan had made offensive comments about Hindu gods and Maratha king Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj.
The sole male complainant, 36, is a senior analyst dialer who joined TCS in 2022. He has alleged that on Eid in 2023, Tausif Attar who was then his team leader, took him to his house and forcibly made him wear a “cap of their religion.” However, a purported video of the same event reviewed by HT, shows the two men talking convivially and embracing and posing for pictures right after Tausif placed a cap on the complainant’s head. This complainant has also alleged that he was forced to eat non-vegetarian food whenever they went out even though the accused knew that he was vegetarian. On one occasion, four accused men forced him to read the kalma (a core tenet that proclaims the oneness of Allah) at his office desk, he says in the FIR accessed by HT. It isn’t clear why he waited this long to file a complaint.
In the FIR, citing incidents between 2022 and March 2026, the male complainant further alleges that Tausif Attar once hurled his phone at him after they had an argument . He claimed that this happened after Tausif made an objectionable comment about the complainant’s wife. The complainant added that Tausif had threatened to kill him and that “Ashwini Madam” (Chainani) had been told about the incident.” However, Chainani has not been named an accused in the FIR filed on his complaint.
The other senior complainant, a 36-year-old female, has told the police that following her complaint against Shafi Shaikh on email, he was transferred to another department while yet another complainant, a 25-year-old woman, told the police that when she tried to complain about Raza Memon, a team leader, and Shahrukh Qureshi, Ashwini Chainani reportedly told her, “Tumko kyu highlight hona hai, jaane do, chhod do (Why do you want to draw attention? Let it be. Let it go).
“Chainani was very friendly with the accused. Whenever she would come to Nashik, they would all go out and have lunches and dinners together. She would always back them,” said a senior police officer. TCS, however, maintains that as per their internal investigations so far, they have not come across a single complaint filed under POSH rules.
What makes the Nashik BPO case particularly complex is that the FIRs rest not just on cases of sexual harassment but also on allegations of religious coercion, an incendiary charge in this political environment. In March, days before the Nashik case unspooled, the Maharashtra legislature passed the Freedom To Religion Act, called the Love Jihad Act in popular political parlance which penalises attempts at unlawful conversion. The bill has since been sent by the governor to President of India for her assent. Over the last three years, several right wing organisations, banded under the banner of Hindu Sakal Samaj (United Hindu Society) have been running a high-decibel multi-city campaign against what they term as ‘Love Jihad and Land Jihad.’ To that slogan, has now been added ‘Corporate Jihad.’