Since the day Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide the media has doggedly pursued the story putting out the intimate details of the personal lives of Sushant Singh Rajput and Rhea Chakraborty.
A moment that could have begun a national conversation on mental health and structural forms of exclusion has been milked for more than a month now for cheap headlines. Hundreds of news articles on the most minor and irrelevant details of the whereabouts, social media posts, so on, of every single person to have ever been associated with Sushant Singh Rajput, are posted every day.
News reports have publicly announced Rhea’s address, her phone number, have tracked her every day whereabouts, leaked her call and message records, and made conspiracy theories without any proof.
This is during one of the biggest crises of human rights, social justice, healthcare, education, and economic welfare in the country.
These include but are not limited to large scale unemployment, lack of accessible healthcare during a pandemic, dilution of labour rights, large-scale privatisation of public sector undertakings, anti-farmer laws, unlawful arrests of anti-caste activists and interrogations of dissenting voices, arrests of protestors, medical negligence in prisons, auctioning off of natural resources, inaccessible online education, and so on.
