Sunetra Choudhury: Why I did not name 'Mr Pervy Politician'

I told myself when I wrote my last column (Mind your tongue, Mr Pervy Politician, July 10) that I would not revisit the incident again. I had said what I had to say and would not respond to the speculation it sparked off about the identity of the lascivious politician. But I changed my mind for two reasons — one, in this world of hyper-connectivity, it seems my silence is being construed as something else, and second, I realised from the overwhelming response how it wasn’t about me but about lakhs of people who form half of our workforce.

“When I read your column, it brought back the memory of when I was 20 years old and the same thing had happened to me. I hadn’t said anything then but it happened to me again recently’’ — this was the anguished response of one woman who wanted me to “out” the pervy politician, who hoped that my public shaming would bring some kind of release for her. She wasn’t the only one who was disappointed in me. My twitter feed is now full of messages from all those who felt that I lacked the courage and had ‘chickened’ out. I didn’t know how to tell all of them that this ‘Pervy Politician’ was just one of the many I had encountered, and so I felt it was a bit unfair that I should out just him. I didn’t know how to tell them that some of the others had been much worse, and I was lucky that I didn’t feel too scarred by any of them, but I knew many women who probably were, and didn’t have the space to express themselves.

I was offered help from unexpected quarters. A women’s organisation called to ask if there was anything they could do. I was grateful but I didn’t really know what to ask for. I suppose I could have asked them to organise many more discussions about these things, to set up a sexual harassment panel, perhaps. My organisation does have one of those, as a matter of fact, and it is a fairly active panel as well. While some readers have expressed outrage at why I didn’t receive any support, I just want to point out that I didn’t even take this ‘Pervy Politician’ issue to my editors and they would have read about it like everybody else did. I wasn’t hiding anything, it’s just that, at the time, I was too busy doing my work to report anything else.

I did get some calls from politicians about the column. They said the ‘top leadership’ wanted to know who it was so that they could take action against them. When I asked, out of curiousity, what could be the possible action, they suggested that the said person could be weeded out. While the intention sounded encouraging, my cynicism warned against being made some kind of tool.

Anyway, there was no way I was going to be part of some showcause blame game nonsense. I was also told that the Intelligence Bureau snoops were already working on figuring out who the perv was so I wasn’t going to make their jobs easy for them.

Before I finally close this chapter for good, I should mention that I’m probably going to be bumping into the perv soon. It’s inevitable with me being a political journalist, isn’t it? There’s a planned public event where he’s slotted to appear and I admit, that there’s a part of me that’s very scared about meeting him again. But then I remind myself, I have done nothing wrong and if anything, it’s the perv who should be hiding, not me.

— Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is author of the election travelogue Braking News