Mahmood Farooqui, the Peepli Live director, was recently convicted by the Delhi High Court for raping a woman of US nationality at his house on March 28, 2015.

The correspondent at Washington Post in India, Rama Lakshmi, who knows the victim as well as the Farooqui well, wrote a Facebook post attacking the director.

While expressing her anger against Farooqui she wrote, “Two days after the incident occurred, the survivor messaged me and asked to meet. I was in my office. I did not know what it was about. She came over and she narrated the entire incident for two hours – in tears, anger, shock and loathing. She had been friends with Mahmood Farooqui and his wife. She had met Mahmood Farooqui for help with her research work in Gorakhpur (Mahmood Farooqui hails from that place).”

She further wrote about why the victim came to her to talk about the incident, “She met me that day not because I am a journalist. But as a woman-friend. In her narration to me, there was a lot of shock and disbelief over what he had done to her. She wrote an email to him telling him what he did to her was wrong, and that he should know he cannot go through life doing this to other women. He replied to her email with a short apology.”

Lakshmi has questioned how a person like Farooqui, who is socially and intellectually influential and learned could do something like this, “Mahmood Farooqui is socially and intellectually influential. He enacts stage performances about injustice, human rights and gender. He is a Rhodes scholar. How can such a learned man ever do this, many asked. Others said: She knew him, they were close friends. How can it be rape? As if education and familiarity negates the act of rape automatically.”

Farooqui was arrested after the 35-year0old Columbia University research scholar, who had come to India for her doctoral thesis, complained against him on June 19, 2015. Farooqui had dismissed all the reports of rape allegation against him. However, according to a witness, Farooqui got drunk in a party and took the woman to his house where he committed the crime.

By Prajakt K