The amended law on rape and sexual molestation that Parliament passed in 2013 was intended to protect women. But key flaws in it are affecting relations between the sexes in ways that could make their lives more difficult. On June 23 Satish Kumar, a physically disabled assistant professor of chemistry at St Stephens college, Delhi, who has been accused of sexually molesting and stalking a PhD student, was denied anticipatory bail by a Delhi court.

Although the government has asked for a report on the case, thereby temporarily staying the police’s hand, there is every likelihood that he will very soon end up behind bars. No one knows how long it will be before he gets bail. Delhi police had opposed anticipatory bail for him on the grounds that he is an influential person who has the capacity to destroy evidence and subvert potential witnesses and is likely to do so again. So Kumar is likely to spend the next several months in jail.

Kumar resigned as the bursar of St Stephens college the day after his anticipatory bail was denied. His teaching career has already entered a limbo that it may never leave. His social life is in tatters. Even a complete exoneration months or years in the future will not give any of these back to him.

A similar fate has befallen one of India’s most distinguished sons, R K Pachauri, who was chairman of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change and received the Nobel peace prize on its behalf in 2007. Accused in February of having sexually molested an office aide some 15 months earlier, he immediately resigned his chairmanship of IPCC to keep it clear of controversy.

Unlike Kumar a court did grant him anticipatory bail, but he too now faces the possibility of being denied bail and sent to jail to await trial. Pachauri has irretrievably lost his reputation, his social and possibly home life, and the respect of his peers, and faces the possible loss of his directorship of Teri, The Energy Research Institute, India’s oldest centre for the study of energy and sustainable development. Even complete exoneration will not restore all this to him.

Not everyone can withstand the shock and humiliation. On the evening of December 19, 2013 Khurshid Anwar, director of the Institute for Social Democracy, scholar of Jawaharlal Nehru University, married and father of one child, jumped off the roof of his Vasant Vihar flat and took hours to die. What triggered this was that two days earlier the police had registered a case against him. It is easy to follow how he must have reasoned his way to suicide.

The allegation was very serious – rape, no less – but since the accuser had waited 14 weeks before filing it, exoneration on medical grounds was no longer possible. There were no eyewitnesses so it was his word against hers. But the new rape law passed in 2013 requires judges to accept the woman’s allegation, if it is made under oath. So to Anwar it must have seemed that his chances of escaping imprisonment were not good.

Anwar probably did not have the money needed to fight a prolonged battle in court. In any case, the life he had known was over. Suicide must therefore have seemed a supremely rational choice.

The furore these and three earlier cases have created in the media is giving birth to a new, veiled hostility between men and women in offices, schools and colleges. Corporate managers are thinking twice before they hire women, and professors have taken to leaving their study doors wide open when they meet women students in their offices. All this is happening because of two profound flaws in the 2013 law.

First, although the draft bill sent to Parliament had kept these separate, in a fit of populist fervour Parliament put them together under the single rubric of ‘rape’. What this has done is to treat sexual harassment as being on par with, although not as serious as, rape. This has allowed the police to follow the same investigative procedures for sexual harassment as for rape and other extremely serious crimes in the Indian Penal Code. In essence this is ‘bring them in, lock them up and sweat a confession out of them at leisure’.

The second flaw is its grant of complete anonymity to the accuser but not to the defendant. Given the stigma that attaches to rape, not against the rapist but his victim, anonymity for the accuser is justified in such cases. The same justification, in an attenuated form, can be given for shielding the identity of the accuser in allegations of sexual harassment.

But there can be no valid justification for denial of a similar anonymity to the defendant. This makes abuse of the law to settle personal scores far too easy. We no longer know from where and when an attack will come. This is threatening to turn the workplace into a minefield, and this is changing the relationship between the sexes from cooperation into guarded hostility. Women are likely to be the main sufferers, so it is in the interest of all of us to remove these flaws as soon as possible.