Priyanka Kapoor: It’s all her fault

BY AMRIT DHILLON| IN Media Practice | 29/03/2016
A Hindustan Times’ report on her suicide commits all the same errors that the papers were guilty of in the Aarushi Talwar case
AMRIT DHILLON reports

 

Dead women – dead by their own hand or murdered – are fair game for posthumous character assassination and that is exactly what the Hindustan Times has done in today’s edition (March 29, 2016) with a story by Ananya Bhardwaj on Priyanka Kapoor that trashes her as a loose, wild woman whom her long-suffering husband, Nitin Chawla, tried to knock some sense into.

‘Knock’ is the right word as Chawla, according to what Kapoor told her parents and what Chawla himself has admitted, used to beat her. After hanging herself from a fan in their Defence Colony home, she wrote in a suicide note that she was frightened of him.

Bhardwaj’s story is a disgraceful list of unnamed sources defaming Kapoor. Every sentence oozes misogyny like a viscous, smelly discharge: “….Chawla struggled to cope with his wife.”  Who was beating whom? Anyone would think it was Kapoor who was bashing her husband. The insinuation here is that Chawla was justified in beating his young wife because he was ‘struggling’ to cope with her lifestyle and behaviour.  The person at fault therefore is not the perpetrator of the violence but the victim. Poor Chawla. He was merely trying to enforce what was good for his wife and if she refuses to obey, then she must be subdued with force. 

"Bhardwaj’s story is a disgraceful list of unnamed sources defaming Kapoor. "

 

The woman is guilty on two counts: first in refusing to do what her husband says and second, by provoking  him to use violence, she is responsible for drawing out the nastier, uglier side of his character and for pushing him to lowering himself to depths that he would not otherwise have fallen to, had it not been for her provocation.   

“Sources said Priyanka, who frequented night parties before marriage, started feeling suffocated after Nitin asked her to stop drinking and settle down as a homemaker”. This is the most disgraceful sentence I have read in a long time.  Note the use of the word ‘night’. A woman who goes out at night to parties is a bad woman. Since when do men decide if a woman should drink or not and what they should do with their lives? The message here is that Chawla was justified in is demands and his expectation that, while it is all right for him to run a pub in Gurgaon, his wife would stay at home cleaning and baking, and making  the beds.  The rapists of Jyoti Singh in 2012 believed in the same logic. What business did she have being out on the streets at night? 

“Nitin told the police he could no longer continue to wait for her late into the night. He said after about a month, he began beating her.” That word night again – late into the night.  What was Kapoor doing in the long, dark night? She was doing what all women do late at night. S.…..g around, of course. Any woman who does that needs a good beating and Chawla beat her. The tone of this sentence suggest total understanding of Chawla’s position. Why? Women who are victims of domestic violence are often asked, with some irritation, why they don’t leave their husbands instead of tolerating abuse.  Why did Chawla, if he was frustrated with her nocturnal behavior, not leave her instead of beating her? 

“During questioning, Nitin told the police that he was ‘upset’ with Priyanka’s conduct and often asked her to mend her ways but she refused to listen.”    Did Chawla listen to her when she asked him not to hit her? Did he mend his ways?  By this point of the story, a reader will be heaving with sympathy for Chawla and the cross he had to bear with this wayward wife.

‘Nitin in his interrogation said he was unhappy about his wife being close to her male friend….he said Priyanka was close to him before marriage and had also gone to Egypt with him’.  So the charge of infidelity too is being hurled at Kapoor.   

To be fair to Bhardwaj, she mentions early in the story the fact that Chawla was accused of rape by a woman in Mumbai and that the police are investigating his alleged involvement in cases of cheating and fraud. She is quick to add that these allegations ‘are yet to be verified’.  However, she has no problem quoting anonymous policemen and investigators who can say whatever they like about Kapoor even though it is only Chawla’s word against the dead woman’s.

Exactly as in the Aarushi Talwar case, unattributed comments and slurs from the police are being used to tarnish a dead woman’s character and spin a narrative in which she is to blame for everything and it is the husband who is the victim. As the story continues, ‘police sources’ go on to relate how Kapoor went missing in August and was later found unconscious in a five star hotel. If, as the police say, Chawla and his sister filed a police complaint when she went missing, why are they not prepared to go on the record about this incident?

As happened in the Talwar case, Bhardwaj has repeated verbatim whatever the police are saying about Kapoor without a moment’s reflection as to the wisdom or editorial sense of doing so, not to mention the damage done to Kapoor’s reputation and the prejudicial effect such reporting can have on the eventual trial. Nor does she include what Priyanka's parents told the police  as other newspapers did.  

"As happened in the Talwar case, Bhardwaj has repeated verbatim whatever the police are saying about Kapoor "

 

The story is a perfect example of the double standards and doublespeak that underlie misogyny. So much of what is wrong with this report is so blindingly obvious that it is embarrassing to have to point it out. Every single stereotype that makes a woman the villain is here: the wild party animal, bankrupting her husband with her ‘lavish’ lifestyle, lacking the maternal feelings every woman should have (she wasn’t loving enough towards her stepson), failing to show subservience to her in-laws (Chawla claims she never visited them after marriage),  the woman who enjoys drinking, and the woman who has male friends who must, naturally, be lovers, former or present, since a woman’s nature, being lower than that of a man’s, is not capable of platonic relationships.

The only thing the Hindustan Times report didn’t say is that Kapoor deserved beatings and did a good thing by killing herself. But I guess it thought, why state the obvious?

 

Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist in New Delhi.

 

 

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