The Pulse | Society | South Asia

Tarun Tejpal’s Conviction and India’s Discussions About the ‘Perfect Rape Victim’

It has also reignited debates around the role of the liberal media when the accused is one of their own.

A 2021 photograph of Tarun Tejpal, founder editor of Tehelka magazine, who was convicted on rape charges in August 2026.

She wore the wrong clothes. She was out at the wrong hours. She went to the wrong place. She is always in the wrong company. She was drunk. She invited it.

There have been plenty of ways to dismiss a rape or sexual harassment survivor by simply blaming them. This is so commonplace that, in 2021, a district court in the western Indian state of Goa acquitted a prominent magazine editor, holding that the accuser did not look traumatized in the CCTV footage captured moments after the incident.

Recently, a high court overturned the verdict, specifically dismissing the approach of scrutinizing how the survivor behaved.

The high-profile case involves Tarun Tejpal, who was the editor of the investigative news magazine Tehelka. A female junior colleague accused him of rape in 2013. In the August 2026 judgement, the Bombay High Court sentenced Tejpal to 10 years’ imprisonment.

The high court’s reliance on evidence rather than survivor behavior has been strongly welcomed by gender rights and civil rights activists and a section of journalists. “I believe the High Court judgment is important not just because of the individual involved, but because it reinforces a larger principle,” wrote political commentator Sujit Nair.

Even in 2002, Indian laws allowed men accused of rape to show that the survivor was of generally immoral character. Section 155(4) of the Indian Evidence Act stated that “when a man is prosecuted for rape or an attempt to ravish, it may be shown that the prosecutrix was of generally immoral character.”

Way back in 1980, the Indian Law Commission had recommended that in a case of rape or attempted rape, any evidence or cross-examination related to the past immoral character of the survivor “should be prohibited except as regards sexual relations with the accused.” The commission held it was necessary to “exclude the possibility of evidence of general immoral character being tendered.”

While Section 155(4) was finally deleted in 2003, the government did not impose the explicit prohibition in such questioning as suggested by the commission. This loophole was subsequently exploited, journalist and author Manoj Mitta wrote in a recent article. “The prohibition only on the questions about her character proved insufficient to save her from interrogation about her sex life,” Mitta wrote.

The loophole was finally blocked when India rewrote its anti-rape law in the aftermath of the 2012 gang-rape of a medical student in a moving bus in the national capital of New Delhi. The new law also expanded the definition of rape — covering penetration of the vagina, anus, urethra, or mouth by any object or any part of the body, not just the penis.

The Tarun Tejpal case was the first high-profile case filed soon after the new law came into effect. And yet, during the trial, the survivor faced the same harrowing questions about her behavior after the alleged incident.

The lower court judgement showed it relied on the survivor’s behavior, which it thought did not match that of a raped woman. The survivor’s conduct “neither demonstrates any kind of normative behavior on her own part that a prosecutrix of sexual assault on consecutive two nights might plausibly show, nor does it demonstrate any such behavior on the part of the accused,” said the 2021 judgement.

While hearing the appeal against the judgement, a Bombay High Court judge had even commented that the lower court judgement “seems like a manual for rape victims,” criticizing how much space it devoted to prescribing appropriate survivor behavior.

After the recent verdict, the survivor broke her silence for the first time in 13 years. In a Substack essay, she wrote that she knew only the........

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