She wore the wrong clothes. She was out at the wrong hours. She went to the wrong place. She is always in the wrong company. She was drunk. She invited it.
There have been plenty of ways to dismiss a rape or sexual harassment survivor by simply blaming them. This is so commonplace that, in 2021, a district court in the western Indian state of Goa acquitted a prominent magazine editor, holding that the accuser did not look traumatized in the CCTV footage captured moments after the incident.
Recently, a high court overturned the verdict, specifically dismissing the approach of scrutinizing how the survivor behaved.
The high-profile case involves Tarun Tejpal, who was the editor of the investigative news magazine Tehelka. A female junior colleague accused him of rape in 2013. In the August 2026 judgement, the Bombay High Court sentenced Tejpal to 10 years’ imprisonment.
The high court’s reliance on evidence rather than survivor behavior has been strongly welcomed by gender rights and civil rights activists and a section of journalists. “I believe the High Court judgment is important not just because of the individual involved, but because it reinforces a larger principle,” wrote political commentator Sujit Nair.
Even in 2002, Indian laws allowed men accused of rape to show that the survivor was of generally immoral character. Section 155(4) of the Indian Evidence Act stated that “when a man is prosecuted for rape or an attempt to ravish, it may be shown that the prosecutrix was of generally immoral character.”
Way back in 1980, the Indian Law Commission had recommended that in a case of rape or attempted rape, any evidence or cross-examination related to the past immoral character of the survivor “should be prohibited except as regards sexual relations with the accused.” The commission held it was necessary to “exclude the possibility of evidence of general immoral character being tendered.”
While Section 155(4) was finally deleted in 2003, the government did not impose the explicit prohibition in such questioning as suggested by the commission. This loophole was subsequently exploited, journalist and author Manoj Mitta wrote in a recent article. “The prohibition only on the questions about her character proved insufficient to save her from interrogation about her sex life,” Mitta wrote.
The loophole was finally blocked when India rewrote its anti-rape law in the aftermath of the 2012 gang-rape of a medical student in a moving bus in the national capital of New Delhi. The new law also expanded the definition of rape — covering penetration of the vagina, anus, urethra, or mouth by any object or any part of the body, not just the penis.
The Tarun Tejpal case was the first high-profile case filed soon after the new law came into effect. And yet, during the trial, the survivor faced the same harrowing questions about her behavior after the alleged incident.
The lower court judgement showed it relied on the survivor’s behavior, which it thought did not match that of a raped woman. The survivor’s conduct “neither demonstrates any kind of normative behavior on her own part that a prosecutrix of sexual assault on consecutive two nights might plausibly show, nor does it demonstrate any such behavior on the part of the accused,” said the 2021 judgement.
While hearing the appeal against the judgement, a Bombay High Court judge had even commented that the lower court judgement “seems like a manual for rape victims,” criticizing how much space it devoted to prescribing appropriate survivor behavior.
After the recent verdict, the survivor broke her silence for the first time in 13 years. In a Substack essay, she wrote that she knew only the truth of her body, “frozen with fear, sexually assaulted by a man nearly twice my age, a man responsible for my livelihood, a man who my father knew and trusted, whose family I was close to.”
She explicitly mentioned how the “good victim vs bad victim” battle exhausted her: “My past became a way to deny, and worse, justify my assault: My relationships, my financial precarity, my loneliness, my clumsiness as a 20-something woman figuring her way as a young adult in a new city with new friends. Even my professionalism became a cudgel in the hands of male rage.”
But it’s not only “male rage” that she speaks about. She also mentions how she faced questions on her motivation in accusing a “supposed ‘liberal’ ‘hero’ of rape.”
This is where the second aspect of the Tejpal controversy comes up — the role of the liberal media and the liberal intelligentsia in handling cases where one of their own is involved.
The incident took place inside a hotel elevator in 2013 during an event organized by the magazine in Goa. Tejpal had initially written to the survivor, saying, “I apologize unconditionally for the shameful lapse of judgement that led me to attempt a sexual liaison with you on two occasions…. despite your clear reluctance.” However, later he called himself a victim of a political conspiracy.
Tejpal had become a big name in Indian journalism. A sting operation he led in 2001 had severely hurt the Bharatiya Janata Party government under then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He had earned accolades like “powerful and pioneering,” “one of Asia’s 50 most powerful communicators,” among “50 leaders at the forefront of change in Asia,” and India’s “most feted journalist.”
In 2013, when the controversy broke out, Goa was under the BJP, the party which bore the brunt of Tehelka’s 2001 sting operation. Therefore, Tejpal alleged a political vendetta behind the allegations.
During the subsequent months, several liberals voiced support for Tejpal. Tehelka managing editor Shoma Choudhury was accused of trying to shield Tejpal. In 2014, the news magazine Outlook carried a cover story in which journalist and best-selling author Manu Joseph wrote a highly controversial piece dissecting the behavior of the survivor from CCTV footage he managed to access. The piece, which was highly sympathetic toward Tejpal, quoted him as saying: “She may not have intended to but what she has done is that she has delivered me to the right wing. That’s what she has done.”
In the words of journalist Ranjona Banerji, “Tragically, as in so many cases, the bulk of the old media ganged up against young women journalists for daring to have a voice.”
Even after the recent high court conviction, documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, a prominent face in India’s left-liberal intelligentsia circuit, expressed his suspicion that the high court verdict was possibly a way of pleasing India’s ruling party, the BJP.
“Tejpal preying on young colleagues is reprehensible,” Patwardhan commented on a social media post, adding, “Was it rape?” He then said the CCTV footage of Tejpal and the survivor “entering the lift as well as exiting from it on the upper floor, talking normally” leads him to conclude that no violent incident happened in the lift itself.
When a leading left-liberal voice invests in investigating survivor body language, it does not speak well of those who hold their likes in high esteem.
In her essay, Banerji had asked, “Is rape therefore tolerable if the assaulter is a liberal?” Perhaps this is a question that the high priests of accountability and public-spirited journalism need to ask themselves more deeply. The time has arrived — no matter how the Supreme Court deals with Tejpal’s appeal against the Bombay High Court judgment.