Agencies/New Delhi
The arrest of Tarun Tejpal, the 50-year old founder of top investigative news magazine Tehelka embroiled in a sexual assault case, is imminent, Delhi police sources said yesterday.
Allegations that Tejpal sexually assaulted a young woman colleague have snowballed into a major scandal.
A three-member team of Goa police, which arrived here around 11.30am, visited the Tehelka office and scrutinised documents, including the computers of the magazine’s managing editor Shoma Chaudhury.
The team, accompanied Delhi police personnel, questioned Chaudhury and some other employees of Tehelka.
The allegations hit the headlines due to the prominence of Tejpal, 50, whose magazine is known for its hard-hitting probes into sexual violence against women, corruption and other lawbreaking.
Police in Goa, where the woman was allegedly assaulted twice by Tejpal, began an inquiry on Friday into the incident.
The preliminary enquiry, also known as a First Information Report, allows police to gather evidence in a case and take a suspect into custody for questioning.
Tejpal announced on Wednesday he was quitting his editorial functions at Tehelka for six months after the woman’s complaint was leaked to the media.
In the written complaint, the woman said she had known Tejpal since she was a child and described him as a “father figure.”
She said the alleged assault took place inside a lift at a hotel where the magazine held a conference last month billed as India’s premier intellectual event.
The woman also alleged that when she protested, Tejpal told her “this was the easiest way for you to keep your job.”
In Panjim, the director general of Goa police Kishen Kumar said officers had obtained CCTV footage from the venue and were analysing it.
He would not comment on media reports that Tejpal’s arrest was imminent.
But in what could be a setback for Tejpal, police said CCTV cameras were not installed in the elevator.
“There are no CCTVs in the elevator,” Deputy Inspector General of Police O P Mishra said.
Tejpal in a statement released on Friday had requested investigators to “examine and release the CCTV footage so that the accurate version of events stands clearly revealed.”
“I cannot reveal any more information because investigations are on,” Mishra said.
Sources, however, said CCTV footage from outside the elevator does show the victim leaving “in a hurry” on one occasion.
In the statement, Tejpal offered to co-operate with police, saying he would present “all the facts of this incident” to them.
Tejpal, who has since hired a top lawyer to represent him, told The Economic Times in a report published yesterday the incident was “consensual” and “fleeting.”
Earlier in the week, he had said “a bad lapse of judgment, an awful misreading of the situation, have led to an unfortunate incident that rails against all we believe in and fight for,” in an e-mail sent to Tehelka’s managing editor.
An internal probe is being carried out by Tehelka into the matter.
Violence against women has become a hot-button issue in India since last December’s fatal gang rape of a woman on a bus in Delhi.
Tehelka shot to national prominence in 2001 when it carried out a journalistic sting against the then-Bharatiya Janata Party government in which it showed footage of party leaders willing to swing arms deals for cash.