Dear Twitter, abusing Tejpal's daughter for his sins is disgusting

In these times of trial by Twitter, justice is mostly quick, brutal and heedless. While there is no reason why Tehelka’s editor Tarun Tejpal shouldn’t face the venom that he is facing on Twitter right now, the so called upholder of the rights of women have also decided to mete out justice to the survivor in question on the microblogging site itself. How? By directing the most filthy, unreasonable abuse against another woman - twenty something Cara Tejpal, Tarun Tejpal’s daughter. From suggesting she has been brought up in a brothel to abusing her for not speaking up against her father right away, the Twitter militia turned on Cara with a full blown slander campaign forcing the young girl to delete her Twitter account immediately. [caption id=“attachment_1242073” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Tarun Tejpal’s daughters have been abused on social media. AFP.[/caption] It is important to point out here that Cara had nothing to do with the crime. Though she is Tejpal’s daughter there is absolutely no need to tie her to the incident, given that there is no evidence at all that she was involved in instigating the crime or removing evidence to shield her father. Also, it is understandable if she has maintained silence on the incident which broke in public yesterday, without rushing to comment on it - no one really imagines having to face up to incidents like these, especially when it has got to do with the people closest to you in your life. The news cannot have been anything but traumatic for her to digest. Rushing to Twitter to comment on it would hardly have been on her list of priorities. The victim has not accused either of Tejpal’s daughters of being involved in the crime. Yet, a section of Twitter, euphoric to have found meat to chew on and further a banal secular-communal, Congress-BJP, Modi-Rahul debate, turned on Cara, shaming her, because hey, it’s fun to be insensitive and rub salt into others wounds. Following are a collection of the Twitter abuse hurled at Cara, who consequently deleted her account: “You must be really proud of your dad,” said one of them. Of course the fact that she deleted her account was further cause for ‘shame’ as far as the trolls were concerned. Because ‘how dare you not take the abuse that we feel it is our moral right to hurl at you’. Shame. Women in India can give up on feeling either safe or living with dignity as long as people like these are around. Editor’s note: We’ve scrubbed the abusive tweets previously included in this article. On consideration, we believe it defeats the intent of the article to give such tweets wider circulation. One tweet by Sandeep, which was not abusive, was also deleted. We regret lumping this tweet along with the other abusive ones.