Chetan Bhagat comes out clean on sexual harassment allegations

It seems that the MeToo campaign has surprisingly backfired in the case of Chetan Bhagat. Accused of sending lewd messages and sexually harassing a fellow author, Chetan came out clean with a detailed message conversation between him and the alleged victim, which indicated that the conversation between them involved flirtatious comments from both sides, not just one.

As the Me Too movement was cropping up, author and Yoga teacher Ira Trivedi joined the bandwagon, alleging that Chetan Bhagat tried to be mean with her, just the way she was harassed by popular socialite Suhel Seth, as reported by her on Twitter and in an interview with Republic TV, as noted below:-

Immediately, the entire media swooped down upon the author and accused him of being a pervert, making women feel unsafe. However, it wasn’t until Outlook India published a propaganda article that shamed him, then Chetan had had it enough. He replied back in a terse statement on Twitter:-

Then, all of a sudden, he dropped the bombshell, revealing that the so called charges of sexual harassment were completely false, and the conversations between him and Ira were consensual and innocuous. In fact, it was Ira who was equally being flirtatious as was Chetan during one of the email exchanges that dated back to 2013:-

He then clarified in another tweet that he is not a vindictive person. He just wants to come out clean in an incident, where he was not at fault:-

However, inadvertently, Chetan Bhagat exposed another fake case by his clarification. Stung by his revelations, Ira tried to reply with a long thread, as noted below:-

Unfortunately for Ira, the thread only exposed her hypocritical stance, as she resorted to the classic victim card theory the keyboard feminists of India are only notorious for. In trying to support her, another ‘victim’ also exposed her own hypocrisy, with the following reply:-

For those unaware, Anoo Bhuyan is a journalist at The Wire, who had previously accused journalist Mayank Jain and Anurag Verma of indulging in sexual harassment with their colleagues. If what Chetan said in his clarifications is true, either Anoo was lying then or she is lying now, which is exactly what some of the critics of the Indian #MeToo movement have feared, i.e. the movement being hijacked for personal revenge.

There are some other women who are using this movement for their own selfish advantage, even if it means trivializing the suffering of the real victims and destroying the reputation of an innocent man to tatters. If a man is accused of sexual harassment, that doesn’t mean he is definitely guilty of that crime? Has the notion of innocent until proven guilty gone for a toss?

Now that Chetan Bhagat has come out clean on this issue, the onus is now on Ira Trivedi to prove if she was really harassed and assaulted, or if she wanted to milk the opportunity by joining the #MeToo bandwagon. It is now time that media trials like these could be checked and curbed, if going beyond the reasonable level.