Sandhya Ravishankar, an award-winning independent journalist from Chennai, has filed a complaint with the National Commission for Women (NCW) against popular political commentator ‘Savukku’ Shankar over charges of harassment, stalking and defamation.
Sandhya had done an expose on illegal sand mining happening in Tamil Nadu for which she had won the Ramnath Goenka Award for journalism.
In her complaint to the Commission, Sandhya stated that Shankar had indulged in character assassinating her by making unfounded allegations in an article published on 27 August 2018, in his blog ‘Savukku’. She stated that she neither knew Shankar nor followed him on social media and had come to know about the defamatory article after she was alerted by a friend.
She said that Shankar continued to defame her in his Facebook pages alleging that she took bribes to go after a mining company which runs Tamil Nadu’s one of the mainstream news channels.
Sandhya also mentioned that she had registered a complaint with the Chennai Police Commissioner back in October 2018 but no progress was made on the investigation following which she had written to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in October 2019 and received a response.
She had also filed complaints at the Ashok Nagar police station and Teynampet police station as directed but no action has been taken.
Sandhya pointed out that Shankar was a serial abuser and had earlier targeted a woman anchor and a jorunalist.
Shankar, who runs the blog named ‘Savukku’ also features in several Tamil YouTube channels identifying himself as a ‘senior journalist’. He is known for his abusive behaviour on social media targetting politicians, journalists, judiciary and government officials.
He had once called for a genocide against Tamil Brahmin community. He had called Hon’ble President of India Ram Nath Kovind, a ‘slave dog’. He has made several unwarrant and crass comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He had called Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as ‘Oorgai Maami’, a casteist and a sexist reference to her Brahmin and woman identity. Zoho’s CEO Sridhar Vembu was also targeted by Savukku Shankar and was subjected to consistent harassment through casteist remarks.
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