To add to the misery of the already existing cases of sexual violence against women and children, Dhoni’s five-year-old daughter Ziva has received rape threats on social media by trolls. She has become the latest target after the poor performance of CSK in this year’s IPL. Dhoni’s wife Sakshi also got similar threats on her Instagram handle.
CSK, which has been led by MS Dhoni ever since the inception of IPL, is one of the most successful teams and has won three editions of the game. Sadly, it has been having a lull in its graph and has lost four out of five matches in this year’s tournament. This caused a lot of backlash against the team by “angry fans”, the most recent one in the form of rape threats.
The threats created an outrage on social media, especially from women. Sowmya Reddy, MLA from Jayanagara, Karnataka, wrote on her timeline, “This is just nasty! What’s happening to our country? Where are we heading?” Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi tweeted, “This has to be the most disgusting example of how social media platforms are being misused.”
This incident is particularly disturbing because, while there have been insults hurled at the players per se in the past, targeting a player’s daughter, who is a child, in this case, has been unheard of.