Three observations on the Bombay high court judgment which on Thursday overturned the earlier acquittal of editor Tarun Tejpal on rape charges.

The first: justice for rape survivors should not take over a decade. It’s been 13 years since a young woman journalist accused Tejpal, her then editor, of rape and sexual assault in a hotel elevator during a conference organised by Tehelka in Goa in 2013.

Given that this was amongst the first high-profile rape trials after amendments to the criminal law following the 2012 gang-rape and brutalization of a medical student, this should have been a test case. Instead, it took six years for the trial to even begin. Tejpal has now said he will appeal against his conviction and 10-year jail term, so we have not heard the last of this, yet.

The second: the high court judgment is unequivocal in castigating what it calls a ‘perverse’ earlier judgment. It begins with the words: “This Appeal assails the Judgment and Order dated 21 May, 2021…”. High court justices Neela Gokhale and Amit Jamsandekar are setting right an egregious wrong.

The earlier 527-page judgment by additional sessions judge Kshama Joshi is a textbook case of how not to write a rape judgement.

[I had written on the utterly regressive mindset on that judgment in May 2021 here]

It resorts to stereotypes about how a rape survivor ought to behave. It focuses more on the woman journalist than on the person on trial. During the trial, the court allowed Tejpal’s defense lawyers to grill the woman on her views on smoking, drinking and consensual sex, none of which were relevant to the facts of her complaint.

The Bombay high court judgment is a step forward in righting a terrible wrong. It emphatically rejects the notion of a perfect victim. “Expecting a survivor to be constantly miserable, meek or visibly broken, the Trial Court has ignored the reality of human coping mechanisms,” the judgment notes. “However, these concepts of a perfect victim are a myth. Credibility must be evaluated on facts, not on whether a survivor fits a narrow cultural mould.”

Third observation: Again and again when talking about sexual assault we come back to the question of the price women pay for speaking up. There is a series of........

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