Why Arundhati Roy thinks Tejpal's hypocrisy is his biggest failure

Tarun Tejpal, the country’s best-known investigative journalist, is running out of friends and admirers fast. The latest to abandon him after the sex controversy involving him broke out is writer Arundhati Roy. In her latest piece in Outlook, she rips apart both Tehelka and Tejpal for their hypocrisy. Tejpal and Roy, both Left liberals, are seen by many to be on the same side of the political spectrum, and both go back a long way. As Arundhati Roy writes in her piece in Outlook magazine, Tejpal’s IndiaInk was the first to publish her God of Small Things, the book which went on to win the Booker Prize, catapulting her to global fame. [caption id=“attachment_1249135” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Arundhati Roy. Reuters[/caption] Though she maintained that “…what has happened now has not shocked me, but it has broken my heart”, she minces no words in  attacking Tejpal for his involvement in the intellectual carnival ThinkFest in Goa. This fest is sponsored partly by Essar - a mining conglomerate that has been at the heart of several human rights violations and forced displacements because of its projects in Central India. Roy writes, “Ironically, in other parts of the country the sponsors of ThinkFest have contributed to creating a climate in which scores of adivasi women have been raped and murdered, and thousands of people have been imprisoned as well as killed.” This, according to Roy, clearly demonstrates Tehelka’s double standards when it comes to championing the rights of the poor, the underdog and the oppressed. And this is precisely where the problem lies, which Arundhati Roy with her acerbic tongue calls ‘Rape Number Two’. The problem is not just Tehelka’s stance on ThinkFest, but also the suggestion that the complainant, a young woman journalist in the magazine, is being instigated by right wing supporters who would stand to gain if Tehelka shuts down. This is a degradation of Tehelka’s collective values and an affront to the people who work for and support its philosophy. Read the full piece ‘This is Rape Number Two’ in Outlook here.