The Aaj Tak set became a site of charged drama Tuesday evening. During a debate on the Hyderabad gangrape and murder, Congress politician Alka Lamba accused anchor Anjana Om Kashyap and Aaj Tak of harbouring an agenda when the host asked her not to name the victim of the horrific crime that took place in Telangana on November 29. 

Lamba took issue with the suggestion of not naming the rape victim, given that TV channels had run hashtags with her name for days. India Today, for instance, had carried the victim’s name as a hashtag on its Twitter feed. 

Yet, the moment Lamba uttered the victim’s name, Kashyap turned to the camera and insisted that her channel “respected the Supreme Court’s guidelines”. Lamba interjected that political parties are culpable in promoting sexual violence because they give election tickets to men accused of rape, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Swami Chinmayanand.

“Please, I request you, don’t make this dramatic,” Kashyap told Lamba. 

“Shame on you Aaj Tak,” Lamba shot back. 

Lamba then cried Jai Hind and appeared to be exiting the show, only to swerve back and place herself right before Kashyap. “I’m a mother. These incidents happen everyday and my blood boils,” she told Kashyap, wagging a finger at her. As a stiff Kashyap gazed back, Lamba left the show.

The face-off spilled over on to Twitter today. Lamba pointed to a tweet where Kashyap had named the victim. Kashyap defended herself by claiming that she mentioned the name because everyone was doing so, but refrained after the top court’s guidelines regarding identifying a rape victim were put out. 

Not just Kashyap on Twitter, but Aaj Tak too had named the victim on its website, in a description of a show on the incident on December 1.

It was, therefore, rather ironic when both India Today and Aaj Tak carried articles today calling out Lamba for taking the victim’s name on air. 

On Tuesday, the Delhi High Court issued a notice to India Today for revealing the identity of the Hyderabad rape and murder victim, in violation of the Supreme Court’s prohibition on identifying rape victims as well as section 228A of the Indian Penal Code. 

The notice was also sent to the rightwing blog OpIndia and news outlet The New Indian Express; the central, Delhi and Telangana governments; the Press Council of India and the News Broadcasting Standards Authority of India; and Twitter and Facebook.

According to the Supreme Court’s guidelines, the media cannot publish the name of a rape victim or disclose any fact leading to the revelation of their identity in print, electronic or social media.