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Internet innuendos of the Tarun Tejpal saga

The online jury wasted no time in taking the founding father of Tehelka to trail for his self confessed actions of sexual assault

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On Tuesday afternoon, founder of Tehelka Tarun Tejpal, sent out an email to his managing editor Shoma Choudhary serving his sabbatical as an “atonement” for what he refers to “a bad lapse of judgement”. The king of sting operations was being accused of sexual harassment by a female colleague

As it is with things on the internet, it didn't take very long for the contents of the letter, in all its gory, to spread across social media. First spotted on media blogs, last evening, the news spread like wildfire across social media. Tejpal's actions were being judged by the same yardstick he has used so often to condemn many. Reactions poured in from all sections, and by Thursday morning hashtags like #Tejpal and #Tehelka were trending. BJP member Arun Jaitley raised questions on the integrity of the entire media in a Facebook note.

He compared the coverage of this case with that of the recent cases of sexual assaults involving bureaucratic, political and public figures. “The Indian Media is on trial,” he writes. “A Section of the media is outraged that the police in Gujarat was protecting or allegedly keeping an eye on a young lady even with her and her family's consent,” referring to Amit Shah's snooping scandal. “The Goa incident involving Tarun Tejpal and a young journalist is in a different league altogether,” he claims. “The victim's complaint makes out a clear case of rape.”

He accused the Congress of inaction, “Just because the assailant has connections in the Congress party the nation is deprived of the sage advise of P Chidambram, the caustic comments of Kapil Sibal and the exaggerated tweets of Manish Tiwari.”

The online community, including the media persons, did not shy away from using strong allegories and innuendos towards Tejpal as well as Choudhary for supporting her boss. Tehelka's official twitter account stopped tweeting sometime Tuesday morning, possibly overwhelmed by the online rage. Ironically, one of their last tweets on the ongoing elections, questioned, “Will The Tweets Fall Silent Before Polling.”

There were also those were willing to give the disgraced newsman a benefit of doubt. Javed Akhtar tweeted: 

Incidentally Javed Akhtar received a lot of flack for this comment and was also trending on Twitter.

Twitter trolls did not even spare Tejpal's daughter who was at the receiving end of a lot of online criticism and hate comments, forcing her to eventually delete their accounts.

Needless to say, that this incidence has severly hurt the Tehelka brand, but there were many who remained unbiased towards the headstrong media house, not holding them responsible:

But then again, there are also many others who drew their pitchforks and have been asking for blood!

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