Gurugram: Renu Bhatia, the chairperson of the Haryana State Commission for Women, resigned late on Tuesday under mounting pressure from nursing associations across the state, which had been demanding her removal and a public apology over remarks she made during a visit to Kurukshetra’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Civil Hospital in connection with a sexual assault case involving a 15-year-old girl.
Bhatia sent her resignation letter to Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini on Tuesday, saying she would continue working for women’s rights. She had served as chairperson for more than four and a half years.
ThePrint has reached Bhatia for comment over phone. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
As she stepped down, Bhatia gave a farewell address, a video of which was posted on her Facebook page on Wednesday afternoon.
Thanking former chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar for first appointing her and Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini for extending her tenure, she said she had strived to do her best over four and a half years.
“If during this period there was ever an error in my work, if anyone was hurt because of me, if any work was delayed because of me, then I seek forgiveness, because it is from mistakes that humans learn,” she said.
Swearing on the Gita, she declared she had never been unjust to anyone. She signed off with a wish for whoever succeeds her, that they treat every woman who walks through that door as their own daughter, and resolve her problem as if it were a family matter.
A source in the Chief Minister’s Office confirmed that her resignation had been received and that Nayab Saini was yet to take a call on it.
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The trigger: A hospital visit and a public reprimand
The immediate provocation was a visit Bhatia made to Lok Nayak Jai Prakash (LNJP) Civil Hospital in Kurukshetra after a 62-year-old consultant doctor at the hospital was charged and arrested in connection with the sexual assault of the 15-year-old girl.
Bhatia allegedly reprimanded nurses and officials at the hospital over perceived negligence. A protesting nurse said Bhatia blamed the nursing staff for negligence and accused some of possible collusion in the case. The nurses argued it was unfair to be blamed without investigation.
Nurses at LNJP Civil Hospital observed a two-hour pen-down strike on Monday to protest Bhatia’s remarks. The agitation then spread across the state on Tuesday.
Despite the uproar, Bhatia told the media at Panchkula on Tuesday morning that her statement contained nothing objectionable, and she would not apologise.
Who is Renu Bhatia?
Born in Srinagar, Bhatia first gained public attention as a Doordarshan anchor between 1991 and 2000.
Her most prominent moment in front of the camera came in 2008 when she portrayed former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in a short film, largely due to a striking physical resemblance, earning her the moniker of “Bhajapa ki Benazir”.
Politics, she once said, was always close to home. “My family has long been associated with the RSS and BJP,” she had said.
Her shift to political work began after settling in Faridabad, where in 2000 she was elected as a BJP municipal councillor and later became deputy mayor.
She served as general secretary of BJP’s Mahila Morcha in Haryana. The Haryana government appointed her as chairperson of the State Commission for Women on 17 January 2022. The Haryana Governor subsequently extended her tenure beyond January 2025 until further orders.
The latest controversy isn’t the first time Bhatia has been in the eye of the storm.
Over the past few years, she has left behind a trail of disputed interventions that have drawn as much criticism as attention.
The Ashoka University controversy
The episode that drew Bhatia into the sharpest national scrutiny came in May 2025, when she filed a complaint against Ali Khan Mahmudabad, head of Ashoka University’s political science department, for his social media posts in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor.
The complaint included charges of public mischief, insulting the modesty of a woman, and offences relating to national integrity. Mahmudabad was subsequently arrested by Haryana Police and remanded to judicial custody.
The women’s commission issued a notice to Mahmudabad on 12 May, saying that his Facebook post raised concerns about the disparagement of women in the Indian Armed Forces, specifically Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, and had misrepresented facts through repeated references to “genocide”, “dehumanisation”, and “hypocrisy”.
The professor himself said the commission had “overreached its jurisdiction” and had “misread and misunderstood” his posts to the extent of inverting their meaning.
The arrest sparked widespread condemnation across academia. The Haryana government subsequently declined to sanction the prosecution of Mahmudabad, and the Supreme Court cautioned him on his public remarks.
The Jindal University FIR
Two years earlier, in late 2023, the commission under Bhatia’s leadership had trained its guns on Dr Sameena Dalwai, a professor and assistant director at the Centre for Women, Law and Social Change at Jindal Global Law School in Sonipat.
The commission’s complaint alleged that Dalwai had engaged in “fraudulent use of a Bumble dating app profile ID” and had “exhibited several profiles of female students” during a classroom session on gender.
After Dalwai failed to appear before the commission twice, Bhatia wrote to the police commissioner urging an FIR. Haryana Police eventually filed an FIR against Dalwai on Bhatia’s complaint.
Critics questioned the intervention, arguing that the commission had transformed a contested pedagogical incident into a criminal matter, and that the episode targeted a professor who had also publicly criticised the Israeli military operation in Gaza.
The NIT Kurukshetra visit
In April 2026, as NIT Kurukshetra reeled from four student deaths allegedly by suicide within two and a half months, Bhatia visited the campus and held meetings with the NIT administration, staff and police.
She flagged the functioning of a private bank, ICICI Bank, claiming it had been liberally issuing credit cards to students as young as 18-20 with minimal documentation and charging 36 percent interest, without permission from NIT authorities or parents, and alleged this was pushing students into debt spirals that led to the suicides.
Sexist comments
Bhatia’s conduct at another public event had also landed her in controversy.
Speaking at a function organised by RKSD College, Kaithal in April 2023, on awareness of laws and cybercrimes, she made remarks that drew widespread criticism for blaming women who reported sexual abuse.
Describing cases where girls alleged they were drugged, assaulted and then blackmailed by boyfriends who had taken them to OYO hotels, she said the girls “very well know that when they go to such a place, they are not going there for reciting Hanuman Ji’s aarti”.
She added that when girls go to such places “something bad can also happen in the name of friendship”.
Women activists and social media users condemned the remarks as victim-blaming by the very official mandated to protect women.
Videos of the speech went viral. Bhatia also called for changes to live-in relationship laws, arguing that Supreme Court guidelines had left the commission with “limited authority” to intervene in such cases.
She also said that live-in relationships were contributing to rising crimes against women, a position that drew further criticism from rights groups who said it conflated personal choices with criminal culpability.
The woman police officer row
Among the incidents that had drawn attention earlier in her tenure was a viral video in September 2022 that purportedly showed a heated altercation between Bhatia and a woman police officer in Kaithal during a meeting over a marital dispute case.
In the video, Bhatia appears to be telling the officer, “Get out! There will be a departmental inquiry against you,” after accusing her of getting a woman medically examined three times without similarly examining the man. The clip circulated widely and drew criticism over her conduct.
The NRI deportation threat
A second viral video in December 2024 appeared to show Bhatia threatening an NRI man with deportation and the arrest of his parents over a marital dispute case.
During a video call hearing, when the man could not commit to a return date, Bhatia purportedly told him he must return within 10 days or face deportation and the arrest of his parents.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)