An Indian journalist said on Friday that she is facing “rape threats” after being suspended from her job at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s most prominent newspapers, for a post on Twitter in which she referred to Krishna as, among other things, a “fuckboi.”
Krishna is one of Hinduism’s most venerated gods. Journalist Srishti Jaswal insisted, however, that she was not referring to the Hindu Lord Krishna in her tweet but to the character Krishna in the film Krishna and His Leela, released by Netflix last week. The film has stirred outraged in Hindu nationalist circles for using the name of a god for character depicted as a womanizer, particularly as one of his female partners is also named after the goddess Radha.
Jaswal responded to a post on Twitter about the film – which news sources reporting on the incident have not identified and, as Jaswal appears to have deleted the tweet, it cannot be found in her feed – by writing, presumably in response to a description of the Netflix film character, “Because this is what Krishna did. He was a womanizer, a fuckboi, and commitment phobic maniac. And I am a Hindu and I’ve read mythology.”
Despite the fact that the post read “I am a Hindu,” Jaswal prompted a barrage of vitriol in her direction from those who believed her statement to be a reflection of her opinion of the god because of her reference to mythology. At least one member of India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has filed a legal complaint against Jaswal for her remarks.
The Hindustan Times announced on Thursday that it had suspended Jaswal and that it did not endorse her opinion of Krishna, whichever Krishna she may have been referencing.
Jaswal is not an entertainment or religion reporter, so her comments do not have any relation to her work. This week, prior to her suspension, she appears to have been focusing on the effect that the Chinese coronavirus pandemic has had on education in northern Chandigarh, where officials are scrambling to plan for safe in-person schoolteaching. Jaswal’s Twitter history appears to show her as a critic of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Jaswal issued a statement on her Twitter account Friday accusing critics of sending her rape threats and making her reasonably fear for her safety. She also insisted that, “mythology” remark aside, her insults were directed at the Netflix film character and not the Hindu god.
“The comment by me was not meant to maliciously denigrate Lord Krishna or to in any way outrage the feelings of my fellow Hindus,” Jaswal wrote. “It was in the context of a Netflix show where the character bears the same name (Krishna).”
While Jaswal did not provide any examples of the rape threats she received, India is in the midst of an ongoing rape crisis, struggling to keep staggering rates of rape of women and girls under control. As Deutsche Welle reported in December, “according to the latest government figures, Indian police registered 33,658 cases of rape in 2017. Experts say that a woman is raped in India every 16 minutes.” Many of these are gang rapes featuring other extreme violence such as beatings, torture, and killing.
In 2016, the government responded to growing reports of rape by telling women not to wear skirts.
India’s political opposition blame Modi for the rise.
“Narendra Modi has said ‘Made in India,’ but nowadays wherever you look, it’s ‘Rape in India,’” opposition leader Rahul Gandhi proclaimed in December, following the arrest and conviction of former BJP lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar on charges of raping a teen woman and then planning a failed homicide attempt that killed two of her relatives.
Even prior to the Jaswal uproar, Hindu nationalists on Twitter had launched a campaign to boycott Netflix entirely for distributing the film, the latest in several controversies in the country that have led to mob violence in response to film and television media. The response to Krishna and His Leela has been more muted than the outrage in 2018 following the release of Padmaavat in 2018, a film about Hindu queen Padmavati who, legend has it, killed herself after a Muslim sultan attempted to take her hostage. The film depicted Padmavati more amenable to romantic conquest at the hands of the sultan, perceived as an insult to all Rajput people by some in the community.
“Just hours after Padmavati was cleared by the CBFC [India’s film censorship board], the Rajput Karni Sena threatened to vandalise all cinema halls showing the movie,” the Times of India reported. “They also demanded a complete ban on the film and threatened to ‘set ablaze’ cinema halls screening it.”
Mob attacks targeting cinemas playing the film occurred throughout the country. A BJP politician reportedly offered a reward for beheading Deepika Padukone, who played Padmavati in the film. Police made few arrests.
“There’s nothing new in it, every year some movie is accused of hurting sentiments. After which protestors barge into theatres, damage furniture, break glass and rough up the staff,” an unnamed movie theater manager in Delhi told the Times of India in 2018.
Another lamented the lack of police action against mob attacks on theaters: “These protesters barge into cinema halls in groups, break things and leave. Even if we complain to the police, they won’t search for them or will jail them. So there’s no point in filing an FIR [a police report]. Instead, we ask for police support.”