Don’t politicise rape, says woman journalist

New Delhi – A woman journalist who resigned from Tehelka and has accused founder-editor Tarun Tejpal of rape Friday urged political parties to refrain from politicizing the issue.

“I call upon our political parties to resist the temptation to turn a very important discussion about gender, power and violence into a conversation about themselves,” she said in a statement here.

She said she was “deeply concerned” and “very disturbed” about suggestions that her complaint against Tejpal was a part of “a pre-election political conspiracy”.
“Suggestions that I am acting on someone else’s behest are only the latest depressing indications that sections of our public discourse are unwilling to acknowledge that women are capable of making decisions about themselves for themselves,” the journalist wrote.

“I categorically refute such insinuations,” she said in her statement posted on Kafila.org.

The woman journalist quit Tehelka weekly newsmagazine after accusing Tejpal of sexually assaulting her in a luxury hotel in Goa early this month. Tejpal Friday left for Goa in response to police summons in the state.

She also said that it is the law which categorizes a crime, and in this case, “the law is clear: what Mr. Tejpal did to me falls within the legal definition of rape”.

“Now that we have a new law that broadens the definition of rape, we should stand by what we fought for,” she said.