Thirteen Years, One Verdict - And Still Not Over

What Thirteen Years Actually Cost a Survivor

Imagine reporting a sexual assault by someone with more institutional power than you in 2013. Imagine that eight years later, in 2021, a court tells you that your smile in a photograph, taken soon after, makes your account harder to believe.

Imagine that five more years pass before a higher court finally says plainly: there is no such thing as a "perfect victim," and neither the court nor your abuser gets to decide how you should have looked, spoken or behaved.

And now imagine that even this verdict - thirteen years after the original assault - may not be the end, because an appeal to the Supreme Court still looms. That is not a hypothetical. That is the actual thirteen-year arc behind the Tejpal case and it raises a question the celebratory framing of "justice finally served" tends to skip past: what does justice actually cost the person who has to personally outlast the system to receive it?

The Tension That Doesn't Resolve Cleanly There is a

real and serious reason trials take this long and it isn't bureaucratic indifference alone. Due process - the right to a fair trial, the presumption of innocence, the right to appeal an unfavourable verdict - exists precisely to prevent wrongful convictions.

Those protections apply equally to a genuinely guilty man and a wrongly accused one, because the system cannot tell the difference in advance; that is the entire point of a trial. Shortening those protections specifically in sexual assault cases, however well-intentioned, would set a precedent that could just as easily convict an innocent person faster as it could spare a genuine survivor unnecessary suffering.

But the same procedural safeguards that protect against wrongful conviction are what forced this specific survivor through eight years to a wrongful acquittal, then five more years and an appellate battle to correct it - years during which, the High Court itself noted, she was compelled to resign from her career.

Both concerns are morally real. Neither cancels the other out.

What the System Still Owes

The honest position is not to weaken due process for survivors' sake - that would corrode the very credibility that makes any verdict, including verdicts that favour survivors, worth trusting. What the system owes instead is enforcement of the protections that already exist but were ignored: Section 53A of the Evidence Act explicitly bars invasive cross-examination about a survivor's past, yet the trial court permitted exactly that for years before an appellate court intervened.

Somewhere between the Verma Committee's 2013 reforms and this verdict, the gap between the law as written and the law as practiced is itself where thirteen years of a person's life went missing.

The Reckoning the Verdict Doesn't Complete

A ten-year sentence, however deserved, does not return the eight years the trial court's stereotypes cost this survivor, nor does it guarantee the appeal ahead won't extend the ordeal further. Calling this "justice served" without naming that cost isn't dishonest - but it is incomplete.

The right resolution here isn't choosing between due process and compassion. It's insisting that due process, properly enforced from the start, was always supposed to make this kind of thirteen-year cost unnecessary in the first place.