#SackRekhaSharma, Says Twitter, After Old Tweets Spark Outrage

A controversy that began on Tuesday when the National Commission for Women (NCW) tweeted that its chairperson Rekha Sharma discussed issues including a “rise in love jihad cases” with Maharashtra governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari has now snowballed into demands for her resignation. 

As screenshots of Sharma’s old tweets began circulating on social media, the NCW chairperson, a verified Twitter user who has more than 84,000 followers, made her account private. Twitter users including Alt News’s Pratik Sinha pointed out that the number of tweets on her profile have decreased since then, suggesting that she may have deleted many of them.   

‘Love jihad’ is a term used by many right-wing activists to describe what they allege is a conspiracy by Muslim men to trick Hindu women into relationships and ultimately religious conversion. It is not just communal but also patriarchal, as it completely disregards the woman’s agency in the relationship, as many Twitter users pointed out.

The conversation around Sharma turned into a bigger controversy when people dug out misogynist, offensive tweets by her.

Alt News’s Sinha pointed out that Sharma has deleted at least 200 tweets from her account.

Sharma, however, told NDTV that there was “suspicious activity” on her Twitter account because of which she changed the settings to hide her tweets. 

She said, “My stand on this is that I have complained to Twitter as there was suspicious activity happening on my account and its under investigation... Won’t like to reply on trolls.” 

This is not the first time Sharma, a former BJP district secretary and media in-charge in Haryana, has landed into controversy. 

In an interview with HuffPost India’s Piyasree Dasgupta in 2018, she had claimed that increased compensation for survivors had led to a rise in the number of gangrape cases being reported and that sexual violence was closely related to education and ‘gruesome’ rapes in India were perpetrated by men with less education.

When asked about how the number of reported rape cases in India are actually less than the actual number of cases that must be taking place, she claimed that the actual cases are less because many rape accusations were false. “Sexual violence is closely related to education and the more ‘gruesome’ rapes India has witnessed has been perpetrated by men with less education.” 

She also claimed, “There are many fake cases. Around 30 percent of cases are fake. There is a property issue and they will include a line that a person has sexually abused me, touched me there.” 

Her past comments that were in the public domain triggered a massive Twitter storm, with people asking her to resign using the hashtag #SackRekhaSharma. 

Here’s what people said: