Tarun Tejpal behaved like a fugitive from the day his shocking criminal conduct with a female colleague became public. He tried to cool off the issue by going underground and buying time. The author of The Alchemy of Desire could not handle the inferno of desire, which eventually consumed him. The man who has made a career, and by all accounts loads of money, out of ripping apart people's reputations, has joined the league of the most disrupted personalities in public space.
Tejpal tried every trick in the book, legal and otherwise, to evade questioning by the police and eventual arrest. He did various somersaults which would have earned him the admiration of the world's best trapeze artists. He first admitted to his guilt (in writing, to the victim), and later claimed that the incident was a mere “light-hearted banter” and “consensual”. Just to make sure that he had muddied the waters enough, Tejpal dragged politics into what is a clear instance of sexual assault — and, as the victim has pointed out, rape, under the revised definitions of the law that his beloved Congress-led UPA regime piloted after being rattled by the December 16 incident in Delhi. If one has to believe the accused, there exists a conspiracy by the Bharatiya Janata Party to frame him.
Is he saying that the victim is a BJP plant or that she has been coaxed by the party to fix TejpalIJ Behind the absurdity of the allegation of a grand ‘Hindutva conspiracy' (Tejpal gives himself too much importance) lies yet another attempt by him to defame the young girl by imputing that she worked as a honey-trap. No wonder his one-time friend and author Arundhati Roy has termed Tejpal's allegation as “Rape Number Two”. She appears clear that Rape Number One happened.
Of course, Tejpal will refute the interpretation and claim that his accusation was directed at the Government of Goa, from whom he did not expect justice because it belonged to the BJP, against whose members Tehelka had conducted sting operations in the past. But even this explanation does not cut ice. If anything, the Manohar Parrikar regime in the State has handled the issue with extreme caution and has diligently adhered to the legal protocol. Some would actually say that the State has been over-cautious. After all, once a First Information Report of rape gets registered, the accused is rarely extended the courtesy of appearing before the police for interrogation at his own sweet will. Goa Police did not act in vendetta. It first recorded the statements of Tehelka employees with whom the victim had shared her traumatic experience, took the victim's statement, and summoned Tejpal only after the girl had recorded her statement before a magistrate in Goa.
Had there been politics, Tejpal would have been behind bars within hours after the FIR was registered. In any case, the courts and not the BJP regime in Goa will decide on his guilt.
The former Tehelka supremo's luck has run out. His disgrace is so complete that even the media, which is generally wary of registering even mild criticism against one of its own, has torn him to shreds. His attempt to discredit the victim has been as colossal a failure as his devise to rake up the issue of secularism in a desperate bid to divert public attention and win some words of assurance from Congress leaders whom he has praised and helped further their political cause. He appears to have forgotten that there is nothing ‘secular' or ‘communal' about rape.
The Congress is caught between a rock and a hard place. It cannot summarily dump a man who has been of immense value to the party and it cannot support him (at least overtly) because his crime is so heinous. The links between Tejpal and the Congress are deep. At least one Minister has admitted to having helped Tehelka with money in the recent past when the magazine was in financial trouble. The Minister claims he gave the funds because he wanted to protect the “freedom of expression”. There are other media groups which can do with some funding; will the Minister help them protect ‘freedom of expression’IJ Tejpal's touching faith in Congress president Sonia Gandhi and his deep affection for Rahul Gandhi is in the public domain. With his connections to the ruling party, he had made it to the Prasar Bharti board before the scandal blew in his face and he lost the chair before he could sit on it.
Given that Tejpal has taken a sabbatical of six months to atone for his sin (of course that is now redundant since he has subsequently judged himself innocent!) and his successor Shoma Chaudhury has quit after she came under the line of fire for trying to hush up the rape incident, a question mark hangs over the future of Tehelka. There has been a concerted attempt by apologists of the accused and supporters of the magazine to convince people that ‘brand Tehelka' must be separated from Tejpal's shame. But that is not possible for two reasons. First, the ‘values’ that Tejpal stood for had been all these years equated with the lofty ideals that Tehelka promoted with such boastfulness. Second, the magazine's management and managing editor (until Thursday) Shoma Chaudhury colluded in trying to brush the victim's complaint under the carpet. The fact that half-a-dozen journalists have quit the publication in recent days, being apparently upset over the manner in which the organisation has handled the Tejpal issue, strengthens the perception that Tehelka as an organisation not only did not act forcefully against the accused but also proceeded to shield him.
In other words, Tehelka is as tainted as the magazine's founder; the latter allegedly committed a crime, while the former attempted a shameful cover-up. Obviously, in the light of recent developments, fresh questions will be raised in some quarters over Tejpal's real intent behind his publication's many sting operations that made him and Tehelka national heroes. Were they motivated by a genuine desire to expose wrongdoing (as the correspondents who went about their job must have sincerely believed) or was there a dishonest agenda bordering on blackmail (which the likes of Tejpal and his coterie had finalised)IJ These questions had been posed even earlier, but the people who voiced them were dismissed with contempt in the surfeit of credibility which the now accused had generated by his ‘courageous journalism'.
You need to be a Tarun Tejpal to believe that there is no contradiction between the various stories the magazine has done on the exploitation of women across the country and his own damning conduct with a female employee.