In the past week, five words have become ingrained in the public consciousness, sprouting memes, songs and music videos.
“We can see his bum.”
If this moment of pop culture zeitgeist has passed you by, it’s what lawyer Vedika Chaubey said during a debate on NDTV when explaining why she’d filed a police complaint against actor Ranveer Singh. Singh’s nude photoshoot had been published in Paper magazine the week before, and Chaubey was having none of it.
“What is vulgar about it?” anchor Nidhi Razdan asked her.
“Of course this is vulgar!” Chaubey replied. “We can see his bum! His video is with me. He is completely nude in that video.”
A week later, Chaubey is sticking to her guns. The Mumbai police registered an FIR on July 26 after Chaubey and an NGO, the Shyam Mangaram Foundation, filed complaints against Singh. Charges include insulting the modesty of a woman.
“We are not staying in Germany or Poland where these kinds of porn things or nude people roam around,” Chaubey told Newslaundry over the phone. “We are not used to these things. I have two daughters, a mother, and a sister. If I cannot see these photos with them, how is this good for society?”
Chaubey said she first saw a picture from the photoshoot on Twitter, where she follows Singh, but took note of it only the next day, when her colleagues were talking about it. She also accused NDTV of pursuing an “agenda” against her (even though she returned to the channel days later for another debate). “They were waiting that when Vedika comes, we will pounce,” she said. “They had an agenda.”
After her NDTV appearance, she said she’s also being trolled – but not threatened – on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and her blog.
But Chaubey herself has a background in media. Before getting her law degree in 2019, she was a journalist for 12 years, starting her career in 2004. She worked for BBC and Mid-Day, covering railways for the latter for around 10 years, and also freelanced for the Hindu.
Her claim to fame is, perhaps, that in 2017, the Hindu retracted a story she wrote about the victim of a stampede in Mumbai being “molested” by a bystander. This was later found to be untrue. Issuing an apology on Twitter, the newspaper cited a “failure to adhere to journalistic norms”.
A journalist who was with the Hindu’s Mumbai bureau at the time said this marked the end of Chaubey’s career with the paper, though Chaubey wasn’t entirely to blame.
“It was one of those days where everything that could go wrong did,” they said. “The reporter, desk, editor did not double-check...Barring the incident, there was never any problem with her work.”
When asked about the 2017 incident, Chaubey said she didn’t want to comment on it. She now works with her husband’s law firm, AVC & Associates, in Mumbai.
Her husband Akhilesh Chaubey is, according to his Facebook profile, “secretary of Maharashtra BJP” and former general secretary of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. He used to represent Raj Thackeray, defending him in cases where he was accused of anti-migrant speeches and violence. In 2014, Akhilesh was the MNS’s “first north Indian candidate” in the assembly poll.
Like her husband, Vedika Chaubey’s heart now lies with the BJP.
“I am a BJP supporter by birth,” she told Newslaundry. “Kamal ke alava mujhe kuch dikhta hi nahi hain. I can’t see anything besides the lotus [BJP’s party symbol]. It is in my blood.”
But she made sure to delete references to the BJP after her “we can see his bum” moment – including from her Twitter bio – because she “wasn’t representing any party or agenda when I filed the complaint”, and she didn’t want it to become a “bigger issue”.
As things stand now, Chaubey is waiting for Ranveer Singh to apologise. (Singh has maintained a studied silence since the controversy began.) “It’s been more than a week and he hasn’t come to say sorry to the women and children who have a problem with his nude picture,” she said. “If he is not going to apologise, I think he should be arrested.”
Given that she became a lawyer to work for women, she added, she filed a case because her modesty was outraged. After all, if she didn’t, how would anyone else?
“The law has given me the right to do this,” she said. “If he wants to show his private parts, he should make a website and put it there where people can subscribe to see it. He is not a porn star, he is an actor. I think he is a respectable person and a good actor and human being. But he is a superstar and has an influence. Freedom of expression is to a certain extent. Whatever he does at home, I don’t have a problem with. But even if you stand at your home’s window and wave, I will have a problem with that.”
Speaking about the “group of people” who liked Singh’s photos, Chaubey said, “I don’t know who these people are, but they are going all over the internet and putting rubbish things about him.”
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