A US-based woman journalist has accused the former minister of the state of external affairs M.J. Akbar of raping her years ago when he was with the Asian Age as editor.
Pallavi Gogoi, an India-born journalist, who is now the chief business editor at the non-profit National Public Radio (NPR) recalled in a lengthy blog post for the Washington Post, how she was “preyed upon” by Akbar years ago.
The incident took place in a hotel in Jaipur. “He ripped off my clothes and raped me”, she wrote. Pallavi was 23 and was the editor of the op-ed page of the Asian Age at the time of the alleged rape.
It was in 1994, one incident took place, Pallavi writes, as she being the then editor of the Asian Age’s op-ed page, went into Akbar’s cabin at the newspaper’s New Delhi office. During the meeting, while praising her work, Akbar “suddenly lunged to kiss me”,
A few months after the New Delhi office incident, Pallavi was sent to a remote village to cover an honour killing. “The assignment was to end in Jaipur. When I checked back, Akbar said I could come to discuss the story in his hotel in Jaipur, far from Delhi. In his hotel room, even though I fought him, he was physically more powerful. He ripped off my clothes and raped me,” she describes.
And things, it seems, got even worse.
She added that his grip over her got tighter and she stopped fighting his advances because she felt so helpless. She writes that for a few months, he continued to defile her sexually, verbally, emotionally.
Though Mr. Akbar faces multiple accusations of sexual harassment and molestation, even more than a dozen, but until now, Akbar was not accused of rape, a criminal offence that carries a mandatory jail term.
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