Panaji: Former Tehelka founder-editor Tarun Tejpal, sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment by the Bombay HC last month for raping a junior colleague in 2013, surrendered Monday before a court in Mapusa, Goa.Tejpal had appealed against the order in the SC, which directed him to surrender within two weeks.The high court on Aug 6 overturned Tejpal’s 2021 acquittal by a lower court and pronounced him guilty. His advocate sought a lenient sentence on the grounds that he is a senior citizen today, aged 62, and that the case is 13 years old. Tejpal addressed a division bench of Justices Neela Gokhale and Amit Jamsandekar and claimed he was a “political victim”.“The appreciation of evidence by the trial court is not only unreasonable but perverse. The conclusions arrived at are untenable and, in the established facts, the view expressed by it is not a possible view,” the bench held. “Rather than evaluating the sterling case, the trial court resorted to hyper-technicalities” and “unjustifiably granted the benefit of doubt to the respondent where none reasonably existed”, it stated.
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HC observed that the trial court “permitted an invasive, humiliating cross-examination into the victim’s past sexual history, moral views and personal WhatsApp messages”, despite statutory provisions prohibiting such questioning. The bench held that the lower court wrongly drew adverse inferences from the absence of visible injuries, the survivor’s inability to access a 7-year-old email account, her failure to physically resist in a particular manner and “her smiling demeanour during subsequent work events”. Referring to apology mails sent by Tejpal to the survivor, HC noted that the trial court had erred in observing that there was no admission of sexual assault.