In 2013, Ms. Flavia Agnes, feminist legal scholar and activist, in an Asian Age article (available here now) held a mirror to the society that broadly identifies itself as ‘progressive’ by questioning the complicity of silence and murmurs in the Tejpal case. Mr. Tejpal, a progressive ‘hero’, a courageous journalist was charged with ‘rape’ under the expanded definition of penetration in the Criminal Amendment Act 2013. What followed was a public scrutiny of the charges and the complainant claiming that the complaint was false, that the case was politically motivated to delegitimize the wonderful work he did, and a general disbelief that someone ‘like us’ could never be charged with a crime like rape. Standing at that critical juncture, where ‘one of us’ was charged with a crime that ‘people like us’ regularly condemn and call out, Ms. Agnes’ piece was poignant. She recounted that after the 2012 brutal Delhi bus rape case, followed by the historic Verma Committee Report when the law was amended to widen the definition of ‘rape’ to include insertion of not just penis but objects into body orifices, not just to vagina, but also anus, urethra and mouth (oral sex) and the stringent punishment that such acts carried, little did ‘people like us’ realize that one day it would come to bite us, bite people close to us, the people we respect. The litmus test in such cases was to adhere to our commitments to equality before the law and equal protection of law, and to stand by our feminist principles which never go amiss when the accused hails from a certain socio-economic class, like the Shakti Mills case or the 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder. This is the Tejpal Test for ‘people like us’—to continue upholding our feminist principles even when people like us are involved.