In June 2020, not long after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant lockdown, the actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his life, about a week after his girlfriend or about a year — actor Rhea Chakraborty — moved out. Rajput had already been undergoing treatment for bipolar disorder. Apart from the breakup, another recent event, the suspicious demise of a talent manager he knew, named Disha Salian, had also affected him. By July 2020, Rajput’s father had filed a case against Chakraborty and others, and in September she was arrested and jailed for almost a month under a narcotics charge. After nearly five years, the Central Bureau of Investigation has finally declared the case closed and ruled Rajput’s death decisively not a murder, but a suicide, clearing Chakraborty of all charges.
All this while, however, Chakraborty had been widely villainised by many news channels and large sections of society, online and offline. Her career was damaged, as was her own mental health. She has spoken publicly about both of these impacts.
What happened to Rhea Chakraborty is an exemplar of how issues of men’s mental health are used to villainise women in India. Recently, there has been a spate of high-profile suicides in which men have left evidence openly blaming their spouses or in-laws for why they took the decision to end their lives, as has been discussed in this column recently. In Rajput’s case, he did not leave any such evidence. Even without it, the public was instigated into baying for Chakraborty’s blood.
Forget who these people are for a second and imagine the layers of pain in both of them, and in their loved ones. The termination of a relationship, mental illness, a pandemic, a demise. That is an immense amount of stress and upheaval, as it is, worsened by incarceration, scapegoating and harassment in Chakraborty’s case.
Chakraborty deserves public apologies from the media houses that fueled the witch-hunt against her, at the very least. As for the masses who fell for the misinformation, their apologies are irrelevant. Their contrition, if they have it, matters only when it comes to whether or not they introspect on how easily they were persuaded into hating an individual, but also into why. There is misogyny or internalised misogyny behind that, along with an abject lack of empathy about mental illness’ effects on a person and those around them.
Rajput’s suicide should have been read as a warning bell about mental health — a topic that especially at that time, due to the pandemic, had widespread implications. Instead of accepting that a public figure struggled with mental illness and took an extreme decision because of it, the hastiness to frame the event as a murder and partake in either boosted TRPs or else in sensationalist consumer practices was more attractive to too many. Living celebrities who have talked about their mental health struggles — notably, Deepika Padukone, who has been treated for clinical depression — are often turned into memes.
The public response to celebrity mental unwellness is reflective of how ordinary people are treated in households, schools, companies and other institutions. Will Chakraborty’s vindication, at least, teach us something?