I cannot begin a letter with “dear”. For decades we have been comrades in many battles where we have fought shoulder to shoulder. We have been daughters and fathers, brothers and sisters, spouses, lovers and most importantly friends who have valued each other’s convictions and stood in each other’s corners. And still.

On August 6, the Bombay High Court reversed the 2021 acquittal by the Additional Sessions Court Mapusa, of Tarun Tejpal, the former editor of Tehelka, and sentenced him to ten years in jail for sexually assaulting a junior colleague in an elevator.

The first remarks by Tejpal to hit the press included the fact that he was 62 years old, had a wife, and was being politically victimised like the incarcerated activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam – who, unlike Tejpal, are languishing in jail for over six years without even the hint of a trial. And immediately some of you, our friends, turned rape apologists.

From expert opinions on the survivor’s failure to look like a person who has just been sexually assaulted to contemplations on the Rashomon nature of the judgements of the two courts with “amusing facts” making for good cinema – social media is abuzz.

You did not look up the definition of rape and yet doubted its occurrence. You did not consider the past 13 years of the survivor’s life as she bravely confronted character assassinations and yet questioned her integrity.

The chimera of the “ideal survivor” invoked regularly at rape trials has haunted this one too. Judges and counsel routinely rely on unwritten social scripts of how an ideal survivor should look, feel, and react.........

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