Dhanya Rajendran wants to take a victory lap. With Tarun Tejpal now convicted and sentenced to 10 years, she reshared Network of Women in Media, India (NWMI)’s 2021 critique of the sessions court’s acquittal, the one that shamed the survivor for not looking “traumatised” enough, and reminded everyone that she/NWMI “always demanded punishment for Tejpal.”
Fair enough. That critique was right. The 2021 judgment was a disgrace, and NWMI was correct to say so.
But there’s a problem with Dhanya Rajendran positioning herself as the standard-bearer against victim-blaming in this case: her own outlet is in a running strategic partnership with the platform that published the single most infamous piece of victim-blaming the case ever produced.
The Letter Nobody at Newslaundry Wants to Talk About
In February 2014, Newslaundry published a piece by Nirupama Sekhri titled “Letter To Ms Tehelka-Assault-Victim.”
It opened by declaring, in the writer’s own words, that she did not see the survivor as a victim, “unless it is of bubblegum feminism.” It went on to interrogate the survivor for entering the lift a second time, for not fighting back, for not immediately reporting the assault, and for supposedly ruining Tejpal’s life. It stated outright that Tejpal, not the woman he assaulted, “has become the victim.”
The piece has stayed live on Newslaundry’s own site since the day it was published. There is no editor’s note distancing the platform from it, no correction, no acknowledgment that it reads today exactly as it read then: a public interrogation of a rape survivor’s behaviour, published under Newslaundry’s own byline system, on Newslaundry’s own platform, run by Newslaundry’s own founder, Abhinandan Sekhri.
Instead there is a ‘rebuttal’ to the letter that they ‘magnanimously’ published.
A Convenient Silence
Newslaundry and The News Minute are not casual acquaintances. The two outlets operate a joint subscription model, co-host town halls together, run shared editorial programming like the Weekly South Central podcast, and have synced their backend paywall systems so subscribers move seamlessly between platforms. This is a commercial and editorial alliance, publicly branded and actively marketed to readers.
Which makes it worth asking: in all of Dhanya Rajendran’s public commentary on the Tejpal case – the NWMI critique, the renewed victory-lap posts after the conviction, has she once mentioned that her own strategic partner published one of the most widely condemned pieces of survivor-shaming in the entire saga? Not that one can find.
That is not a minor oversight. NWMI’s own 2021 document spends pages meticulously cataloguing every instance of victim-blaming language in the sessions court judgment – “the prosecutrix is lying,” her “typical evasiveness,” her supposed failure to look sufficiently devastated. It is a serious, granular takedown of exactly this kind of rhetoric. And yet the same energy has never, publicly, been turned toward a media partner that ran a piece using nearly identical logic almost a decade earlier.
Accountability Journalism Doesn’t Get to Have a Blind Spot for its Friends
This isn’t about relitigating what Nirupama Sekhri wrote in 2014, or about pretending Dhanya Rajendran personally commissioned it. She didn’t. But that’s exactly the point – accountability journalism only means something if it applies consistently, including to the outlets you’ve chosen to build a subscription bundle with.
If Dhanya Rajendran’s position is that victim-blaming language deserves sustained public scrutiny regardless of who’s doing the judging, that standard doesn’t get suspended the moment the offending platform happens to be a commercial partner. Either the standard is real, or it’s selectively deployed against judges and rival outlets while staying silent about the people you split subscription revenue with.
Tejpal’s conviction is a legitimate moment to revisit how badly this case was handled by India’s media and judiciary. It would carry more weight from someone willing to look at every direction that scrutiny needs to point including the one closest to home.
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