Tarun Tejpal, former editor-in-chief of Tehelka, was accused of sexually assaulting a junior colleague in a hotel elevator in Goa in November 2013. A trial court acquitted him in 2021; this August, the Bombay High Court's Goa Bench overturned that acquittal and sentenced him to ten years' rigorous imprisonment. He has said he will appeal to the Supreme Court.

In the note he wrote after the allegation surfaced, Tejpal called the act — without specifying what "it" was — an "error of judgement," and offered to atone by staying out of office for six months. Read plainly, that note is close to a confession. Tejpal has since called the case a political vendetta, engineered by right-wing figures angered by his past reporting.

Let's be clear first: there is no context that excuses sexual assault. No means no, regardless of the relationship — lovers, spouses, friends, strangers, sex workers. Nothing about who the parties are changes that.

But the vendetta question is worth thinking through, not dismissing outright — and this isn't sympathy for Tejpal. Consider M.J. Akbar. Another powerful editor, later a union minister in the BJP government, accused during India's 2018 #MeToo movement by more than twenty women — mostly former colleagues from The Asian Age and The Telegraph — of harassment and predatory conduct going back decades.

Priya Ramani was the first to name him publicly, alleging harassment during a 1993 job interview in a hotel room. Pallavi Gogoi and others alleged far worse, including rape. Akbar denied everything, calling the accusations fabricated and insisting some relationships had been consensual.

The pattern alone sets the cases apart: Akbar faced a chorus of women, Tejpal a single accuser.

The outcomes diverged sharply too. Akbar resigned as minister on October 17, 2018, under mounting public and political pressure — despite never facing a criminal case. In February 2021, a Delhi court dismissed his defamation suit against Ramani, ruling that a woman's right to raise sexual abuse, even decades later, cannot be trumped by a man's social standing.

His attempt at intimidation failed. Notably, none of the twenty-plus women who spoke out against him filed criminal complaints — the incidents were decades old, and many said the practical and emotional cost of pursuing that litigation was too high. The police didn't take suo motu cognisance, either. 

Tejpal's case took a different route from the start. There was no complainant— the Goa Police took suo motu cognisance in November 2013, filing an FIR based on media reports alone. That's a meaningfully different starting point. Was that unusual state initiative shaped by Tejpal's journalism?

Tarun Tejpal and M J Akbar: Two of India's most prominent editors, were my bosses at different point in time, both accused of preying on junior colleagues — and yet almost nothing the police action, or the outcomes looks the same.