Mid March, when life was hectic for her with exams around the corner, Assistant Professor Rekha Nair was not expecting concerned calls from her former students, living in other parts of the country. Rekha, who teaches English at the UC College in Aluva, Kerala, was told of the news that came on Dainik Bhaskar, a prominent daily in the North of India, about a certain stenographer involved in a corruption scandal in Chhattisgarh. The stenographer’s name too was Rekha Nair, but the photograph that came along with the article was the professor’s.
The article had come on March 16. The professor who came to know of it on the 17th, immediately approached the police. She went to a lawyer – Adv K Sunitha Vinod – who asked her to get the original copy of the paper before sending a legal notice. “But the problem didn’t end there. I did not think of this, but several online news portals picked up the story and used the same picture,” says Professor Rekha Nair.
The story was about another Rekha Nair, who had worked as a stenographer to suspended Chhattisgarh DGP Mukesh Gupta. The Economic Offenses Wing conducted a raid on her house, in connection with a multi-crore corruption scam.
As soon as a copy of the original article was obtained, Rekha’s lawyer sent a legal notice to the newspaper on April 24 but they refused to accept it, confirms Sunitha. The notice, accessed by TNM, explains the mistaken identity and the damage it has done to Rekha’s reputation, who has been a professor of the UC College since 2006, and is a mother of two. It asks the newspaper to give a correction, with the actual image of the accused stenographer, and compensate Rekha’s losses with Rs 2 crore.
“The news had come on the paper on March 16 and March 20. It got picked up by multiple news media, including a television channel in Kerala, that ran it all day with Professor Rekha’s photo. We are now in the process of sending legal notice to each and every media that put out her image for the news,” Sunitha says.
Dainik Bhaskar paper cutting carrying news with Prof Rekha's photo
Rekha approached the cyber cell too and through its interference, several online portals have taken down the photos, including Dainik Bhaskar that published it first. “They haven’t responded to our notice but they have mostly taken it down. I don’t think an entire check has been done yet,” Rekha says.
Nearly all the news that is available online is in Hindi, so Rekha fears that her students and others who live in that part of the country would see the headline and believe the news. “Some of the students who called me said that there are others who shared this news on their (online) groups, believing it to be true, wondering how ‘our Rekha ma’am could do it’. These are mostly students I haven’t taught but would have seen me in the campus.”
Her college – colleagues and administration – has been hugely supportive, she says. And life would have slowly come back to normal had not the second round of news pieces popped up. “This happened when the accused came to Kollam and newer articles got printed, but again using my photo. At this time, older articles with my photo too resurfaced. Even now, if you search for the story, it is my photo that Google prominently shows.”
Around the same time – in early May – the accused gave an interview to a channel and that’s how her image finally came on the internet. But it is still the professor’s that shows up in the first few rows.
“The next step is to sue the newspaper daily that first printed the story for defamation. It is not small, the damage it’s done to the professor. She cannot possibly go around explaining to every single person who has read the news that is not her,” Sunitha adds.