The Tarun Tejpal issue is the first test case of the much-publicised Criminal law (Amendment) Act, 2013, which strengthened anti-rape laws. Can Goa Police and prosecution rise to the occasionIJ
Soon after the Tehelka episode broke out into the open, a former senior member of The Pioneer posted a Facebook comment addressed to a journalist working for the daily (the former associate might have done it to others in the organisation too; I am aware of this one instance), taunting the paper for obliterating the incident from its pages. For the record, just one national daily of prominence had reported it on the first day because information was then sketchy. Thereafter, the media, The Pioneer included, sunk its teeth into the issue. This daily wrote an editorial demanding a thorough probe into the allegation of rape that one of Tarun Tejpal’s employees had levelled against him. The Pioneer followed it up with a series of news stories as the episode unfolded and penned a second editorial welcoming his arrest by Goa Police on Saturday. The insinuation that this paper had tried to ignore the issue initially, thus, stands falsified.
It’s not just The Pioneer but the Press in general which has behaved in an exemplary fashion in reporting the shameful incident. In fact, by extending wide coverage to an alleged act of crime by one of its own, both the print and the electronic media have managed to somewhat ‘atone’ for their conspiratorial silence over the questionable conduct that some members of their fraternity were supposedly involved in, which came to be known when the infamous Radia tapes were exposed. Perhaps it’s just a heightened sense of journalistic ethics or the juiciness of the story or that Mr Tejpal had rubbed many people even within his own profession the wrong way or the fact that the Tehelka boss was caught with his pants down when he had been going around the country speaking against the ‘bestiality’ of human nature, that made the media go hammer and tongs against him. Whatever, for now he seems to deserve every bit of the infamy that he is inundated with.
Meanwhile, now that the police has secured Mr Tejpal’s custody for six days, the talk that Goa Police blundered in not arresting him soon after it lodged a First Information Report against him nearly a week before he was apprehended, should end. The police had preferred caution to a knee-jerk action. It first got the statements of the victim’s colleagues to whom she had confided, then had her statement recorded before a magistrate, and only thereafter moved to arrest the Tehelka chief. It’s difficult to understand what different could have happened had Mr Tejpal been arrested a week before November 30. Crucial evidences in the form of email exchanges between Mr Tejpal and the victim, for instance, are in the possession of the police — and so are the various recorded statements. All that the police and the prosecution have to do is to build on them and ensure that witnesses do not turn hostile in the coming weeks and months.
The accused’s persistent cribbing that the Bharatiya Janata Party Government in Goa was out to tarnish his image and that no fairness can be expected from the State’s police, is difficult to digest. In the first place, the State regime did not tell him to indulge in the crime. Second, it’s the courts and not the Government that will decide on Mr Tejpal’s guilt. Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar has yet to show any inclination to influence matters against the accused. Speaking to this columnist, Mr Parrikar said on the day Mr Tejpal landed in Goa for interrogation on Friday, that he was not monitoring — and had no intention to monitor — the issue on an “hourly basis”. He added that he had directed the police to “follow the due process of law and not be influenced by any side”.
Having known the Chief Minister from close quarters (I served as his media adviser and Director of the State’s Department of Information and Publicity from end-2002 to end-2003, before he had to quit the chief ministership in the wake of desertions from the BJP led by Mr Digambar Kamat), and studied his politics for a decade, I can say with some certainty that Mr Parrikar must have consciously maintained a distance from the issue, intervening only when it became absolutely and administratively necessary.
By the way, Mr Kamat, although a Congressman, must be secretly happy over the developments, since independent accounts have it that his Government had been arm-twisted by Tehelka’s promoters into shelling out several lakh rupees for one of the editions of the now infamous Think Fest event (the figure is said to range between Rs 45 lakh and Rs 70 lakh). It must have been easy for Tehelka to coerce the mild-mannered Mr Kamat.
If Ms Shoma Chaudhury, who took over from Mr Tejpal after the latter, in an act of ‘atonement’, resigned for six months as managing editor of the paper, and subsequently quit after she came under fire for trying to suppress the alleged crime and failing to support the victim, is made a prosecution witness, the case against Mr Tejpal will get fortified. If she doesn’t, the law, as they say, will take its course in her matter. Ms Chaudhury has been moving around with a sense of injured innocence ever since it became known that she had failed to act appropriately after she came to know of the alleged crime; she acted, on the contrary, in the most improper manner by not informing the police. In a bid to enhance her credibility, she has claimed that it was at her insistence that Mr Tejpal tendered a written apology (via email) to the victim, admitting that his action had been a “lapse of judgement” and that he was atoning for it.
It must be said of Ms Chaudhury that, albeit unwittingly, she has squarely placed Mr Tejpal in the dock. The Tehelka chief’s confession, which she claims to have extracted, is an unadulterated admission of guilt, and nothing that Mr Tejpal has been saying thereafter can substantially dilute that. Of course, it will be interesting to see how this confession and the subsequent flip-flops by the accused are legally reconciled by the defence or exploited by the prosecution. For now, it can be said that Ms Chaudhury succeeded in getting a confession (from Mr Tejpal) that has more evidentiary value than any admission to the crime which he could have made before the police, and later retracted in the courts on the pretext that he had been coerced into making the confession.
What nextIJ The Goa Government must seize the moment and, as the case progresses towards the charge-sheeting stage, it must move to have a fast-track court in place to hear and dispose of the Tehelka issue. This is more so because the issue is the first test case of the Criminal law (Amendment) Act, 2013, which came in the aftermath of the December 16 incident, and which has broadened the definition of rape.