In two seemingly unrelated incidents, a woman was brutally attacked in a Bangalore ATM..and in another..a woman journalist assaulted in an elevator by a high-profile editor in a fit of what he says, was an appalling “lapse of judgement.” In the first instance, the weapon of attack was a machete. In the second, the sense of entitlement that power brings. The ATM attacker perhaps wanted money. You can see him intimidating the woman, beating her into submission and then wiping his hands clean off her blood. He probably didn’t know he was being recorded by a camera or maybe he didn’t care. In Tejpal’s case, there was no camera. He did what he did because he thought he could. And because, he felt impervious, cocooned in his professional equity against commonplace issues like accountability, decency, professional propriety and an ethical if not a moral compass.
**
Both attacks were an assertion of power and in both cases there probably was no remorse and only fear in retrospect and the thought, “How do I get away with this?” The first attacker has not yet been found and if and when he is, he probably won’t argue an intellectual lapse of judgement to save his skin. Tejpal, however stung by the details of the attack being made public has chosen to respond in a way that neither damns him fully nor exonerates him. Molesting a junior colleague who also happens to be your daughter’s friend is just a lapse of judgement that can be atoned for by a six month long vacation in the hope that by the time he returns to helm one of the most strident and self-righteous publications in the country, this whole “internal matter” will be forgotten. He will probably write another book, be asked to read from it at literary fests and walk away from this mess with the self-assurance of someone who has recovered from a minor set-back and can now go about setting the world right.
**
Things like this afterall have happened before and will happen again. Many working women today are perhaps looking back and remembering an office where a colleague would masterfully pull a chair in a strategic spot to stare at young interns. Or an editor who would discuss Tania Zaetta’s sex life with a smirk on his face with a woman colleague in his cabin while she squirmed in her seat. Or the bully who sat behind his desk with his shirt unbuttoned almost till his waist and verbally abused and belittled women subordinates who did not see things his way.
**
Men in power don’t always have to attack a woman physically like Tejpal did. But some of them do target a “difficult” woman and take away her assignments, shame her before her colleagues for petty reasons, stamp on her self-worth, question her character, pass comments on her age, her marital status, micromanage her till she either becomes an appeaser or quits. It does not happen always but it happens often and it takes a very strong woman to keep her dignity when the muck flies around her because as always she has to explain her conduct and cannot question the conduct of those in positions of power.
**
It is no different than taking a machete and asking a woman to give in or else. It is still too early to say whether this episode will send a collective shiver down the spines of men like Tejpal but if it can start a process of introspection and stop a few more lapses of judgement from happening, and encourage more victims to feel rage rather than fear, it will be a start.