Tejpal case shows that justice can’t demand a ‘perfect victim’

There is a particular cruelty in vindication that arrives 13 years late, because the temptation of a moment like this is to mistake relief for justice. On Aug 6, 2026, a division bench of the Bombay high court at Goa set aside the acquittal of Tarun Tejpal, former editor-in-chief of Tehelka, convicted him of aggravated rape and allied offences, and sentenced him to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment. The court called the 2021 acquittal “perverse”. Those of us who argued then that the acquittal had put the complainant, not the accused, in the dock can take grim satisfaction. But satisfaction is not the same as a system that works, and it is the distance between the two that this judgment illuminates.

Consider what the acquittal did, because the conviction is legible only against it. The trial court resurrected Sir Matthew Hale’s 1736 instruction that rape is an accusation easily made and hard to be defended, an idea Indian jurisprudence had long disowned. It treated the survivor’s poise as proof of mendacity, and her education and access to feminist lawyers as evidence of a doctored conspiracy. Most damningly, it permitted a cross-examination running to nearly a thousand pages into her past relationships, her drinking, her friendships, in flat defiance of the statutory shield Parliament erected after the Nirbhaya protests. Section 53A of the Evidence Act, the amended Section 146, the deleted Section 155(4): the hard-won architecture of the 2013 reforms was treated as though it did not exist.

HC read that same record and refused its logic. What struck the bench most was the trial court’s “noticeable silence” while the defence used cross-examination to “harass and humiliate her”. Here is a court that has understood what feminist scholarship taught a generation of us to see: that the rape trial is a spectacle, and that cross-examination does not merely test a woman’s account but re-enacts the violation. The bench dismantled the archetype of the “perfect victim” who is believed only if she is absolutely vulnerable, innocent and passive, holding that credibility must be evaluated on facts, not on whether a survivor fits a narrow cultural mould. It held her testimony sterling, needing no corroboration. It read Tejpal’s two apology emails as admissions irreconcilable with his total denial, saw no knavery in a woman compelled out of her job claiming severance, and named the power that structured the encounter: the accused was her employer, her mentor, her father’s friend, the father of her close friend. The bar was high. An acquittal carries a double presumption of innocence, and appellate courts may interfere only for perversity. That the bench found it, in the trial court’s reliance on inadmissible material and the judge’s failure to shield the witness, is a conclusion earned rather than assumed.

A decade and more of a woman’s life, her privacy and her intimacies laid bare, was the price of the sentence. Justice arrived not because the machinery functioned but because one woman had the stamina, the documentation and the solidarity to outlast a powerful man. That is not a system working; that is a system relying on heroism. The very power differential the aggravated rape provisions exist to punish was reproduced inside the trial itself, where wealth bought years of attritional cross-examination. Even the sentencing carried an aftertaste of ambivalence: ten years, the statutory minimum, justified partly on the reasoning that “both parties must have by now moved on with their lives”, the judiciary convicting and consoling in the same breath.

To grasp how exceptional this outcome is, look at three days earlier. On Aug 3, a Delhi court acquitted Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, six-time parliamentarian and former Wrestling Federation chief, in the sexual harassment case brought by six women wrestlers, among them Vinesh Phogat. They were dragged along the road at Jantar Mantar in 2023 for demanding an FIR; the Pocso case involving a minor collapsed after she retracted; and through it all the man retained his influence, his son inheriting his seat, while the prosecution crawled to an acquittal. Tejpal at least faced trial and now conviction. The wrestlers, national icons with medals around their necks, could not move the machinery without a hunger strike, and are still waiting for justice. The Tejpal verdict is the exception that measures the rule.

But the test is not whether HC got it right. It is whether the 1,000-page cross-exam becomes unthinkable when the next woman testifies in sessions court. Until then, the honest word for this week is not triumph but debt: the debt a constitutional order owes to an unnamed woman journalist whose complaint in Nov 2013 became the first great stress-test of the post-Nirbhaya law, and who paid with the better part of her adult life.

Sen is an advocate, Calcutta High Court

END OF ARTICLE