Censorship – Academia

When college professor Tejaswini Desai told her first-year class that perpetrators of rape can be from any religion or community, she never imagined that the consequences would include being questioned by the police and a hate campaign on social media. But this is precisely what happened this month to the 52-year-old physics professor at the Kolhapur Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering.

Desai had been assigned to teach a class on human values and professional ethics after the previous lecturer resigned. The lecture on June 8 began quietly enough, she told Newslaundry. The class of around 50 students told her they’d previously had a group discussion on discrimination. Desai suggested a discussion on gender discrimination, but it was shot down. “Some students demanded to have a discussion on religious discrimination,” she said. “I agreed to their request.”

Desai was concerned, worried about “students of other religions in the class”. “Things should not get ugly. So, I told them rape is not limited to any particular religion or community and rapists don’t have any religion or caste. It comes under the category of heinous crimes.”

Some students allegedly recorded videos of Desai speaking in class. By June 16, videos of Desai were circulating on social media. They showed her purportedly saying “Aurangzeb was good” while “Patil and Deshmukh were rapists”. The videos were posted by several accounts on Twitter and Facebook. A single tweet of social media influencer Shefali Vaidya was retweeted more than 1,000 times and got over 50,000 views.

Desai asserted that she’d never said those things – the videos were edited and taken out of context. She only learned about the videos on June 16, eight days after the class, when she was summoned to the principal’s office. An officer from Gokul Shirgaon police station was there too, and allegedly told her the video was being “widely circulated”.