Irish woman raped in Kolkata: Why the media should be ashamed

A young Irish woman, an NGO volunteer, was allegedly raped in Kolkata over the weekend. Aside from that fact, there is little any of our newspapers seem to agree upon when it comes to this case. A rape story often ends up as a contest between “he said” and “she said”. The latest rape story coming out of Kolkata, about a young Irish woman, is turning into a ludicrous contest of “this newspaper said” versus “that newspaper said”. Let’s first take the ages of the people involved. The Telegraph says the woman is 22, the alleged rapist, Sujoy Mitra, is 25. The Times of India puts them at 21 and 25. The Statesman has them at 21 and 36. The Daily Bhaskar says there are 21 and 35. Now let’s go to actually what happened. Here’s the lead-up. The Telegraph says the two met at a birthday bash hosted by the woman’s friend at a nightclub. The Times of India says it was the woman’s own birthday party, a “night-long” event to which the man had been invited through a mutual friend. The Indian Express says she invited him to the party to celebrate her birthday. The Times claims they had known each other in the US when the young man was studying hotel management there though this was the first time they were meeting in Kolkata. Other papers imply they were strangers who bumped into each other that night. The Statesman says the man followed her around in the New Market area where she was wandering around and then accosted her in the nightclub and persuaded her to go home with him. The Daily Bhaskar and The Hindustan Times report he befriended her while she was strolling around and invited her to his home for a party. [caption id=“attachment_836347” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. Reuters.[/caption] Here’s what allegedly happened afterwards. The Deccan Herald says that after the party finally wound down, the “woman dropped an inebriated Mitra to his house in Kalighat, where he allegedly raped her.” The Telegraph claims the woman “felt uneasy after sipping a drink allegedly offered by Mitra around Friday midnight.” The woman said she was drowsy and could not resist him when he allegedly raped her in the car on the way to his house. The Times of India says Mitra invited her in for a cup of tea when they got to his house around 6:45 AM and she passed out right afterwards and thinks he might have raped her while she was asleep. Finally here’s the defence. “The allegations are totally false and motivated. My client is a teetotaller," says Mitra’s counsel Dibyendu Bhattachrya according to the Deccan Herald. Not only that, according to The Times of India, the lawyer claims Mitra is not just a teetotaler. He also suffers from pancreatitis “and is not permitted to consume alcohol, let alone drugs.” But wait, here comes the Daily Bhaskar which says it’s the woman who was the teetotaler and pancreatitis patient, not Mitra.

While investigators initially thought that Mitra had ‘sexually exploited and not raped’ the student believing both to be in drunken state on the fateful night, it was only she revealed that she was a teetotaler owing to pancreatitis that a rape charge was leveled against Mitra.

Let’s not even go into the problematic issues of consent implied here which seem to suggest that if both are drunken it cannot be rape, merely sexual exploitation. This story is deeply troubling because its most basic facts are all over the map. Rape stories are always tricky subjects, open to prurient reporting, where simple facts become objects of leering insinuation and character-assassination. The woman who was picked up and raped from the very same Park Street hotel knows all about that, after having had her character discussed threadbare by everyone from police officers to ministers and MLAs. But the interpretations come later, once the basic facts are established. This case shows how shoddily we do even that. This is not Rashomon where the same story acquires new shades when viewed from a different perspective. These are completely conflicting stories that are being printed as facts by our newspapers of repute. Our media expends so much effort in coming up with heart-tugging pseudonyms like Nirbhaya for rape victims. If they spent that much energy verifying the basic facts, we would all be served better. We pat ourselves on the back for sticking to the law and not printing the name of a rape victim even after foreign media revealed her name. But what’s the point of that much self-control if we botch up the basic facts we are actually supposed to print?