In a surprise U-turn, Shankar Mishra, accused of urinating on an elderly woman on an Air India flight last November told a city court on Friday that the complainant urinated on herself because of a medical condition and then blamed him for the act.
The claim by Mishra’s lawyer Ramesh Gupta, made for the first time since the sordid event unfolded on an Air India New York-New Delhi flight on November 26 last year, flies in the face of denunciation of the accused by some of the co-passengers and even a string of WhatsApp exchanges he had with the victim woman which suggested the unsavory incident indeed took place.
The denial comes just two days after Mishra said he was not running away from the fact that the act was obscene and revolting, however arguing that the complainant’s statement does not make a case of using criminal force to outrage her modesty.
“This lady (complainant) is suffering from a medical condition… She urinated on herself and is now blaming Mishra,” Gupta made the submission before Additional Sessions Judge Harjyot Singh Bhalla while arguing against a Delhi police petition seeking revision of an order passed by a magisterial court denying police his custodial interrogation.
“I’m not the accused. There must be someone else. It seems she herself urinated. She was suffering from some disease related to the prostate which several ‘Kathak dancers’ seem to suffer from. It was not me. The seating system was such that no one could go to her seat. Her seat could only be approached from behind, and in any case, the urine could not reach to seat’s front area. Also, the passenger sitting behind the complainant did not make any such complaint,” Gupta told the court.
The judge disposed of the application, saying the submissions made before him did not seem to have been made in front of the metropolitan magistrate. He said police can approach the magisterial court with its application afresh.
Meanwhile noted Kathak dancer and Padma awardee Shovana Narayan reacted sharply on the submission of Mishra’s lawyer saying that she do not agree with it at all. “I think it is the weirdest reasoning that has ever been put forth. Any peeing or not peeing is not related to any vocation at all. He is trying to create a diversion from the fact that he has outraged a woman’s modesty. I think this is what we all need to understand that this is not done. You cannot pee on a person,” she said while reacting to the submission made by Mishra’s lawyer.
Gupta accused police and the press of turning the case into a joke. “The first complaint was made by the complainant a day after the incident. What was the claim? To refund. That was done by the airline. The police and press have turned this case into a joke... Was this case so big, was it a murder case that they reached Bangalore to arrest me and called me an absconder? He was removed from the job,” the defence counsel said.
Arguing for fresh custody of the accused, the prosecutor told the court that Mishra’s interrogation was required to establish the sequence of events.
The judge, however, said whatever submission he was making was not dealt with by the metropolitan magistrate. “You can go back to metropolitan magistrate with these grounds. It seems the grounds urged before me were not submitted before the metropolitan magistrate. In case these grounds were not made before metropolitan magistrate, no fault can be found with metropolitan magistrate for not dealing with those grounds,” the judge said.