Popular filmmaker Anurag Kashyap’s daughter Aaliyah Kashyap has taken to her social media to expose those who had issued rape threats to her. She shared the screenshots on her Instagram page along with what exactly happened and how this affected her mental health.
It all started when she had posted a pic of her in lingerie recently. She wrote, “The past few weeks have been really hard on my mental health. Ever since I posted a photo of me in lingerie, I have been getting the most vile, degrading and disgusting comments, I have never felt more frightened than I have in the past few weeks to the point where I considered deleting my Instagram. I have tried to ignore the harassment and shrug it off but the truth is that we need to speak about it because these kinds of comments contribute to the rape culture that affects all women in India (and the rest of the world) in one way or the other.”
She added, “We seem to be a country that will hold candle marches for a woman after she’s been sexually assaulted but won’t protect a woman while she’s alive. And the truth is that women in India grow up being sexualized their whole lives, I have grown up with these kinds of comments to the point where it culminated into me being sexually assaulted as a minor by a middle-aged man. The double standard is that many of the people who have harassed me, along with many other women, are hypocrites. They love to pretend that they’re on a moral high ground buy in reality, they are the ones promoting rape culture that exists.”
On the ending note, she wrote, “They are the same men that are fine with following me and consuming the content I post, yet choose to harass me. If you truly disagree with what I post, then you are free to unfollow me. Nothing I do or post is an invitation for sexual assault. Nothing any woman does, ever can be. So instead of policing women how to dress or how to act, we should unteach men the predatory behaviour that has been so normalised in our society. This is my body; my life and I choose what I want to do with it.”
Following this, she has posted the screenshots of the rape threats, vulgar comments and so on that was made on her previous post.