Tarun Tejpal and the search for the ‘Ideal Victim’: A weekly roundup on Constitution First

The Goa bench of the Bombay High Court’s decision earlier this week convicting – and sentencing for ten years of incarceration – Tarun Tejpal, former editor of Tehelka magazine, of sexually assaulting a former colleague arrived as a reckoning of the victim’s thirteen years of a Sisyphean struggle through relentlessness, shaming and facing the regressive churn of our courts. In 2021, eight years after Tejpal was first accused of raping a junior colleague in the elevator of a Goa resort, abusing his position of authority, which he later confessed over email, framing the accusations as political slander, a Goa court in Mapusa had acquitted Tejpal.

That judgment, which arrived after the Supreme Court initially dismissed his plea challenging the framing of charges, noting that the allegations were “very serious, affecting the dignity of a woman”, had seriously undermined how dignity of survivors must be maintained through the challenge of legal processes. Central to the Court’s reasoning, at that time, was its conviction of what an ‘ideal victim’ must look like – noting that the prosecutrix, despite claiming to have suffered from shock and trauma, seemed too “composed” exiting the lift. She even, the Court noted, was seen smiling in photographs later on. “The CCTV footage shows a change to the prosecutrix’s narrative both of the physical circumstances of the moments and of her claims of distress, tears, trauma and resistance,” it noted.

That judgment, which allowed Tejpal the life of a free man for close to a decade, survives today as an important record of the Indian judiciary’s horrific complicities in peddling misogynistic stereotypes against survivors, and its befuddled imagination of what constitutes ‘consent’. Writing in The Leaflet in 2021, Kavita Krishnan had noted, after an exhaustive deconstruction of the trial court order’s many flaws: 

“We need to reflect on how larger social and political discourses converge to treat the testimony by a feminist as a lie, as a conspiracy and as immoral. Judicial training of women in the bar on feminism in law is urgent to counteract this trend, for a feminist method is central to ensuring a fair trial for rape survivors. If the Tejpal verdict is allowed to stand, it will set a dangerous precedent for every rape case to come; and will intimidate and deter every rape survivor from seeking justice.”

Another important reading I was led to from that time was Disha Wadekar’s comment in EPW, locating the court’s search for an ‘ideal victim’ in the Tejpal case as being rooted, essentially, in Brahminical patriarchy. It asked in the end: “How can our justice system safeguard the personhood guaranteed by the Constitution, when it appears to be borrowing from Brahminical patriarchal framework to assess the credibility of survivors?”

The judgment this week held that “the standard of proof expected in such cases must take into account that such crimes are generally committed on the sly, and that direct evidence from a person other than the victim is very rarely available.” In the process, it may have laid to rest the trial court order’s problematic legacy. We have a deep-dive breakdown of the High Court’s judgment this week.