Special Articles

The Print does a hitjob on woman journalist from Swarajya, apologises after being called out, removes apology tweet, apologises again

October 2, 2020
The Commune

On October 1, online news portal ‘The Print’ run by Editor’s Guild chief Shekhar Gupta, carried an opinion piece written by one of its in-house correspondent who had belittled a woman journalist from Swarajya without even running a basic fact-check about the person.

This correspondent named Tarun Krishna, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Mass Communication had written an article titled “You can’t talk of Hathras rape without listing other rapes – thanks to IT cell whataboutery”, in which he had targeted Swati Goel Sharma, a senior editor at Swarajya saying that Sharma ‘ran a campaign’ on ‘love jihad’ while denying caste angle in the Hathras rape incident. He said ‘people like Sharma’ saw ‘jihad’ in love and went on to accuse her of ignoring ‘caste supremacy’ in the Hathras incident where four Thakur men allegedly raped a Scheduled Caste woman.

Upon coming to know of this, Swati Goel Sharma in a series of tweets called out The Print and Shekhar Gupta for the unwarranted slander against her and called the attack on her as ‘gutter level stuff’. She said that she never uses the term ‘love jihad’ while reporting on crimes committed on Hindu women by Muslim men. She added that the writing was ‘ill-informed’ writing and asked the writer of the article to provide proof of her denying caste angle in Hathras case.

Swati Goel Sharma is a ground reporter working for Swarajya who is known for bringing to light atrocities against Dalits that other mainstream media chooses to ignore. She along with Dalit activist Sanjeev Newar (aka Agniveer) runs a non-profit to support the lives of several downtrodden people.

She also came down heavy on the writer of the article by calling him a sick pervert.

Following the embarrassment, The Print quietly pulled down the article. Swati Goel Sharma attached the screenshot of her article being pulled down and thanked The Print and Shekhar Gupta for taking it down.

Realizing that they have been exposed naked, The Print apologized to Swati by replying to her thread. However this was taken down within minutes. They again posted a separate tweet apologizing to Swati but this time they did not quote her thread as they realized that doing so might bring the attention of the people in what they indulged in.

Many on Twitter came in support of Swati when she exposed The Print’s nefarious attempts to downgrade her.