Will the Tejpal judgment destroy 'ideal victim' myth haunting India's rape trials?

For years, Indian courtrooms have asked women to prove they were victims before asking what happened to them. The Tarun Tejpal judgment challenges that script. But will we see the ripples of that verdict in courtrooms soon?There is a number that should stop you before you read another word: 37.8 per cent. That is the share of participants in an Indian National Bar Association study who said they had been sexually harassed at their own workplace. Nearly seven in ten of them (69 per cent) never reported it weighed down by the fear of stigma and a quiet, corrosive lack of faith that the system would do anything with their complaint if they did.A 2018 Indian Express survey found that while 69 per cent of respondents said they supported the MeToo movement in principle, only 34 per cent actually believed its survivors would see justice. And it is not just an Indian affliction.A 2021 UN Women UK/YouGov survey found that among women in Britain who chose not to report harassment, 16 per cent stayed silent because they didn't think they'd be believed — the two most common reasons being that the incident "didn't seem serious enough," or that reporting simply wouldn't help.Believed. That word sits at the centre of everything that follows. A rape case is reported and, weirdly enough, the questions start rolling. Not to the perpetrator but the victim.She is asked questions like: “Why did you not speak sooner?” “Why did you go back to work?” (if it is a case of workplace sexual harassment) “Why did you smile?” “Why did you continue talking to the accused?” “Why did you not look sufficiently traumatised?” “You have had a wild history!” “You don’t look like a woman who has just been sexually assaulted!” In other words, she is asked to ‘perform’ the role of a victim before she is allowed to be heard as one.That is what makes the Bombay High Court’s judgment in the Tarun Tejpal case significant beyond the fate of one man.The Bombay High Court’s judgmentThe Goa trial court had acquitted Tejpal in 2021, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. Its 527-page judgment scrutinised, among other things, inconsistencies in the complainant’s testimony, CCTV footage, her conduct and demeanour after the alleged assault, her interactions with Tejpal and others, and aspects of her sexual history. It also pointed to investigative lapses, including the destruction of potentially relevant CCTV footage.The Bombay High Court’s Goa Bench overturned that acquittal, calling the trial court’s reasoning “perverse” and rejecting the notion that a survivor has to behave like a “perfect” or “ideal” victim for her testimony to be credible. The Bench reassessed the evidence, including Tejpal’s apology emails, CCTV footage and the power relationship between Tejpal and the complainant.“There is no such thing as a perfect victim”A very few people have spent as many years inside a courtroom as Rebecca John, Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India, who successfully defended journalist Priya Ramani in the criminal defamation case brought by MJ Akbar, and who represented the Indian women wrestlers in their sexual harassment case against Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh.John has watched this pattern repeat itself across decades of practice, and she names it without softening it. "It always amazes me that a court likes to package a victim as a perfect victim," she says. "So she doesn't have any past, any future, she's just entered a situation and she's brutally raped." That packaging, she argues, isn't really about establishing truth, it's about giving the court permission to convict, a psychological shortcut dressed up as legal reasoning.The demand for perfection, in John's telling, runs on two tracks. Courts look for physical injury as proof of brutality — never mind that plenty of sexual assault leaves no visible mark. And they look for the absence of what they still, tellingly, call "promiscuity" even though Indian law explicitly bars a woman's sexual history from being used to assess her credibility in a rape case. "The law has changed and prohibits a court looking at past sexual history," John says. "It still looks at it."Then there is what she calls "post-crime behaviour", perhaps the cruellest of the tests. John recalls a case where a woman who had been raped through the night went back to work the next morning, and that ordinary, human act of self-preservation was used to suggest she was lying. "She went back to work the next morning because she wanted to get away from the horror of the experience," John says. "Who are we to judge how a particular person deals with trauma?"Indian law, she points out, already permits conviction on the sole, uncorroborated testimony of a survivor — provided she is what courts term a "witness of sterling quality." It sounds reasonable until you sit with what it actually demands: an unwavering account across the police statement, the magistrate's recording, the courtroom testimony and a hostile cross-examination, with no shifts, no gaps, no human forgetting allowed. "That's an incredible onus on the victim," John says. "It's an impossibility at times to be so consistent." The Supreme Court, she notes, has itself cautioned against this — warning that no witness carries "a video camera in her head."John is careful, and insistent, that none of this is an argument for lowering the standard of proof. "As a criminal lawyer, I do not expect courts to believe even a rape victim if they find serious inconsistencies in their testimony," she says. Her objection is narrower and, in some ways, more damning: that Indian courts routinely confuse disbelieving a case with putting the survivor herself on trial."The victim can be disbelieved without putting her on trial. You have the absolute freedom to do so." A woman accusing a man of cheating or forgery is questioned about the documents. A woman accusing a man of rape is questioned about her life. "That's a problem in understanding the nature of the crime," John says.She traces this instinct back to Mathura — the teenage tribal girl custodially raped by two policemen in Maharashtra in 1972, whose case the Supreme Court dismissed in 1979 partly because she hadn't cried out. The outrage that followed forced the 1983 Criminal Law Amendment, and produced one of Indian legal history's most cited lines, from the open letter four law professors wrote to the Court: submission is not consent.More than four decades later, John says, the reflex the amendment tried to kill is still alive. "We are still looking at the victim as if she's the repository of wisdom, of memory, of perfection. Why? We don't treat our men like that."Of the Bombay High Court's judgment, John is measured but hopeful. "It's a relief to read those paragraphs," she says, while cautioning that it is a Bench-level ruling, not a Supreme Court one, and the matter is far from settled. "We don't know whether this will be upheld or overturned. You have to give it time to resonate."The same week, an inverse verdictCall it coincidence, but while last week Tejpal's acquittal was being overturned, wrestling federation chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, accused by Olympic and Asian Games medalists of sexual harassment, walked free."Everybody who we spoke with, they thought it would be the reverse," says Vandana Shah, an award-winning divorce lawyer and author, who calls the contrast a study in irony. She stops short of second-guessing the judiciary's reading of evidence in either case "unless and until the survivors go and challenge it, this is the truth as seen in the eyes of law."But she is unsparing about the instinct to protect powerful men that both cases, in different ways, exposed. Tejpal, she points out, was once revered as "this suave, godlike figure...a journalist in superhero robes," the man who was supposed to expose wrongdoing, not commit it.She is particularly precise on the mechanics of why the survivor's continued presence at work, and even a second lift ride with Tejpal, were ever treated as suspicious. "You're stuck. This is your boss," Shah says, pointing to Tejpal's own written admission — the survivor telling him, at one point, "You're my boss," and his reply: "Well, that makes it easy."Livelihood, Shah notes, is rarely a free choice for the women who report to powerful men, and workplace safety cannot be conditional on a woman's willingness to risk it. "The least you can expect is a safe workplace."What lingers most for Shah is the cost already paid, regardless of outcome. "She's lost out on 13 years of her life," she says of the survivor — professional years, financial security, a normal life lived in the open — with none of the civil recourse for damages available to survivors in some other countries. And she is candid about how easily women themselves get pulled into policing other women's reputations, into the "good girl, bad girl" framing that lets a case become a referendum on character rather than on the incident.On Tejpal's own conduct since the verdict, Shah's assessment is blunt: no remorse, only self-pity, right down to Tejpal comparing his situation to that of activist Umar Khalid outside the courtroom. And she returns, more than once, to the confession letter Tejpal wrote in the immediate aftermath — his "atonement" email to then managing editor Shoma Chaudhury, admitting to a "bad lapse of judgment." "If you've not done anything, why have you apologised?" Shah asks. "You're not in any pressure point to apologise, because you own the organisation."Fifteen years, and what has actually changedSmita Deshmukh, a former media professional now working as a digital media educator, watched the Tejpal case unfold from inside a newsroom in 2013 and is watching its aftermath from outside one now.Deshmukh calls the Bombay High Court's rejection of the "ideal victim" template one of the more affecting developments she has watched in years of covering — and living through — this beat."This was one of the most heart-wrenching things to have observed," she says, "and also such a good thing that it's finally been acknowledged." She is careful about overstating any single judgment's reach, but she is unambiguous about its symbolic weight, given who the accused is. "This is a watershed moment for all sexual assault cases, especially involving men at very higher echelons of Indian society."However, Deshmukh resists the temptation to pass judgment on the women of an earlier era who never came forward or reported harassment at all. "I do not shame them," she says. "It was a different era... they knew that whatever they would say, the backlash was coming." She draws a parallel with Gwyneth Paltrow, who said she told her then-boyfriend Brad Pitt about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged advances in the 1990s. Paltrow did not speak publicly about the incident until 2017, saying she had been young, frightened and concerned about the possible impact on her career.“If someone like Paltrow—with fame, wealth and considerable privilege could feel unable to speak publicly for years, we should give our women a breather,” Deshmukh says. “Everyone does not come from the same background.”What the verdict cannot fixNone of the lawyers pretend that one High Court judgment rewires a justice system that has spent fifty years perfecting the art of interrogating the wrong person. Courts have fallen into the habit of substituting a survivor's demeanour for evidence in the first place.After the Tejpal verdict, several other women came forward publicly with their own, unrelated accounts of harassment on social media. It is a reminder that a single case in the news rarely stays contained to itself; it tends to give other survivors permission to speak, whatever the eventual legal outcome of their own stories.That, ultimately, is the real argument the Bombay High Court has put back on the table: that the absence of a "perfect" survivor was never evidence of a false case — it was evidence of how little Indian courts have understood about trauma.As Rebecca John puts it, the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt must never be diluted. But the search for a flawless witness, she insists, was never really about proof at all. "We are all imperfect human beings," she says. "That mindless quest for perfection must go."When asked a Gen Z journalist if she thinks the Bombay High Court’s judgment fixes anything, she says, “Not going to undermine what the Bombay High Court judment did, but honestly, as far as my understanding goes, the battle is not even half won. I have friends who have been victims of sexual advances at work, but none would want to file a POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harassment) complaint because they are scared of being dismissed. That is just one reality and even the verdict can be flipped because of course they will appeal in the Supreme Court now. So, trust me, it is not easy and let this verdict not make you feel like that.”- EndsPublished By: Jigyasa SahayPublished On: Aug 10, 2026 11:00 IST