Mohua Das (THE TIMES OF INDIA; September 16, 2020)

Mumbai: In a strongly-worded open online letter, around 60 human rights advocacy groups and more than 2,500 individuals from diverse fields have castigated “News Media of India” for allegedly conducting a misogynistic media trial of actor Rhea Chakraborty.

“We write to ask you to do the right and responsible thing. Your jobs. Hunt news, not women,” the letter said.

Prominent among those who have signed the letter are organisations like Akshara Centre, Saheli, Center for Women, Forum Against Oppression of Women. Individual signatories include actors and filmmakers such as Zoya and Farhan Akhtar, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Anurag Kashyap; academics Swagato Ray, professor at Indian Statistical Institute; Shohini Ghosh, professor at Jamia Milia Islamia; and Dalit activist Deepti Sukumar.

Published on Medium, a blogging platform, on Monday under the blogger name Feminist Voices, the letter questioned the media’s alleged obsession with “creating only one narrative” and their abandonment of “professional ethic of journalism” and “tenet of human decency” to “endlessly violate her privacy” and make “false accusations and moralistic innuendo” for what they feel was an attempt to spin a “Rhea ko phasao” drama. Rhea was the girlfriend of actor Sushant Singh Rajput, who allegedly died by suicide on June 14.

The letter stressed on the skewed nature of Rhea’s media trial, the scrutiny often based on her being a particular kind — “a young woman who makes her own decisions, who lives with her boyfriend without marriage and who speaks up for herself instead of acting like a damsel in distress” — that egged on an online mob that “demonised” her and her family relentlessly and called her arrest a “victory”. It also alluded to the “kindness and respect” that the news media had shown in the past to “the Salman Khans and Sanjay Dutts of this world” while its misogyny was unmissable when it came to a young woman’s “concerns, ambitions, and clothes choices,” all of which the letter rued was “trivialised, dismissed, persecuted”.