Bollywood actress Rhea Chakraborty was arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Tuesday under several sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985. The arrest comes at a time when Rhea has been subjected to scrutiny and media trial following the suicide of her boyfriend and actor Sushant Singh Rajput.
Rhea’s arrest has once again stoked a debate, but this time about patriarchy and how the media treats women who are in the lens as opposed to men.
As the news of the actor’s arrest instantly went viral on social media, her name started to trend on Twitter and Google. Interestingly, another top (related) search was “patriarchy“.
Photographs of the actor coming out from her car in a T-shirt that read: Roses are red, violets are blue, Let’s smash patriarchy, Me and you.” surfaced on social media earlier in the day. While many people endorsed her message, many others opposed it and even dubbed it as “arrogant”.
Since then, the tweet has been met with a lot of criticism and outrage where netizens pointed out that how the media trial meted out against Rhea is outright misogynist and sexist.
And now, netziens, including Bollywood celebrities, are taking social media by storm by sharing the message on Rhea’s t-shirt and pleading #JusticeforRhea.
On Sunday, photographs of visibly disturbed and irritated Rhea Chakraborty struggling her way out of the prying reporters hounding her with cameras and microphones emerged on social media, where journalistic ethics were heavily questioned.
While the past few days have seen a new low for several media channels as well as the paparazzi, social media has not been far behind in adding fuel to what many are now referring to as the witch-hunt of Chakraborty.
After her arrest, trolls and so-called seekers of justice for Rajput found a tweet posted by Chakraborty as far back as 2009. The cryptic post read, “just stepped out of a weird scary engrossing story of an Indian girl…who served 4 n a half year jail sentence for narcotic trafficking”.