A Boston assistant professor has filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard University alleging discrimination because he is from India.

Dr. Rajendra Badgaiyan, an assistant radiology professor for Harvard at Massachusetts General Hospital, claimed that he may not get his license to practice psychiatry because the director of the residency program was biased against Indian doctors. He said the director made false claims about his performance.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Boston named Harvard University, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Grace Mushrush, a doctor and director of Harvard’s South Shore Psychiatry Residency Training Program at the VA Medical Center in Brockton. It also sought unspecified damages. Paul Merry, an attorney who represents Badgaiyan, said his client did not want to comment on the suit. “We’re still hoping to resolve it without further litigation,” Merry told News India-Times. “He is not interested in the law suit but interested in practicing medicine.”

Badgaiyan, who graduated in 1982 from Gandhi Medical College in Bhopal, said he was ranked number one in his class and was successful in the field of neuroscience before he decided to specialize in psychiatry.

The suit alleged that after Badgaiyan joined the residency program in Brockton in 2001, Mushrush made “disparaging remarks concerning physicians of Indian extraction and about the quality of medical institutions and medical education in India.”

He also accused Mushrush of forcing him to repeat training that he had already passed with a grade of “outstanding” or “good,” and that she manipulated his schedule so that it took him six to nine months to complete components of the program that could have been finished in a month or two. The suit accused Mushrush of providing false and derogatory information about Badgaiyan to the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, which has delayed his licensure to practice psychiatry and may even prevent him from getting it.

As a result, the suit said, Badgaiyan is in jeopardy of losing a prestigious fellowship that he was supposed to start this year.