Tarun Tejpal at lit fest: Why Twitter needed to smack Times group into sense

Consider the following situation: Person X is accused of rape. The case is sub judice, though X is out on bail. However, he is invited to be a panelist at a literature fest organised by the country’s biggest media house. Now how would a person - in possession of a human gift called common sense - react to that piece of news? In my case by choking on my tea. After all, these are circumstances that make saying ‘WTF’ aloud a perfectly legitimate and civilised thing to do. However, should we react any differently if Person X is Tarun Tejpal, a man who once frequented the intellectual sanctum sanctorum of the country? In my understanding, not at all. The Times Group, which is organising the Times Lit Fest, however, didn’t think so. So they first invited Tejpal to be a part of a panel which had journalist Manu Joseph as moderator and Basharat Peer and Mani Shankar Aiyar as guests. When the pushback started, Lit Fest organiser Bachi Karkaria told Scroll, “The panel has nothing to do with his personal case. We are aware that this issue is sub judice, Tarun is not convicted and is out on bail. The case is not going to form any part of the discussion, and we have always found Tarun to be an articulate panelist."  [caption id=“attachment_1819295” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Tarun Tejpal. AFP.[/caption] But when the eye-rolling on Twitter would not stop and Swapan Dasgupta, a TOI columnist pulled out and other invitees started wondering aloud on Facebook if they should follow suit, the Lit Fest did a U-turn. To put it in simpler terms, it took social media to tell the largest media house in the country, ‘Are you out of your mind?’, for it to understand what it was doing. While you might want to consider TOI versus Twitter the new Shah Rukh versus Aamir in our world, the broader implications of Twitter having to drill sense into the Times Group are grave and outright outrageous. Let us first start with TOI editor and veteran journalist Bachi Karkaria’s statement on Twitter, announcing that the group’s invitation to Tarun Tejpal has been withdrawn. She sent out the following tweet:

We have asked Tarun Tejpal to drop out of the TOI Litfest. We've got a great program & we don't want it hijacked by extraneous noise.

— bachi karkaria (@bachikarkaria) November 24, 2014

If you were reading that statement on the go, it would sound eerily similar to the tone exasperated mothers use to tell whiny junior schoolers ‘fine, you can watch TV’. That’s the sound of irritation, not regret. But then again, the media group in question is not quite known for endorsing the practice of expressing regret. Just a while back, they devoted the entire first page of Bombay Times to justify why they don’t regret not expressing regret over catcalling Deepika Padukone on Twitter. The regret anyway seems to be about withdrawing the invitation to Tejpal not extending it. The group wrote to Scroll, saying they have ‘regretfully withdrawn’ the invitation issued to Tarun Tejpal fearing that their ’litfest was in danger of being overwhelmed by an extraneous issue’. By first inviting Tejpal to be a part of a literary panel discussion and then dismissing the outrage over it as ’extraneous noise’, the group plays into a bunch of stereotypes that cloud the process of justice delivery when it comes to cases of sexual assault. Let’s get a few things straight here. With the case being sub judice, it has not been proved if Tejpal is guilty in the case of sexual assault yet. It has also not been proved that he is innocent. It is true as Mani Shankar Aiyar tells the Wall Street Journal “The man is under indictment, but he has the right to defend himself and while he’s on bail, there are no restrictions on where he can appear.” In a situation such as this, the group choosing to invite Tejpal in the first place amounts to a kind of unprovoked statement of solidarity long before the verdict. Especially mind you, it’s not like he’s the first and obvious name that springs to mind when it comes to discussing “The tyranny of power” which is what he was supposed to discuss at the festival. And what could be a plausible explanation behind the group’s decision to indulge in this bit of discrimination? Perhaps they hoped the controversy would make the festival more newsy. Or perhaps because the person in question is Tarun Tejpal, a man from the social class which tells itself that it can do no wrong. By jumping the gun on the Tarun Tejpal case and then dismissing the Twitter storm as mere ’extraneous noise’, the group just endorsed the idea that rapists don’t walk among us, hence, an allegation of sexual abuse against one of us should be treated with a fair amount of suspicion for the victim’s motive. Come to think of it, that’s the same kind of logic that works against victims of domestic violence and marital rape - rampant in middle and upper middle classes of our country. While a section of the country is trying to make justice more accessible to women by asserting that sexual violence is not restricted to class, caste and religion, the country’s biggest media group just turned the clock back on that. Does Tejpal have a right to defend himself? He does. Does any person have the right to back him in his/her personal capacity? Yes. But a literary fest putting the accused on its glittering line-up cannot expect to be above scrutiny. Can the country’s biggest media group ask you to separate the knowledge of a rape accused’s alleged sexual misadventures from his literary exploits? Yes, they can.But they have to know that they are also saying that PLUs can’t be criminals. Is that very different in spirit from a Mulayam Singh Yadav suggesting boys will be boys when it comes to “mistakes” like rape? Not really.