One of sergeant Bapi Sen’s five killers is produced in court on Wednesday. Picture by Amit Datta

“She is as guilty as the five constables who beat my son to death.”

Not long after the verdict on the guilty constables was announced on Wednesday afternoon, Menoka Sen, mother of sergeant Bapi Sen, blamed the mystery woman whose honour her son had died defending.

The unknown woman riding pillion on a motorcycle on December 31, 2002, was spotted by Bapi being harassed by a gang of constables. As the sergeant stepped in, only to be mortally assaulted by the rogue cops, the woman left the spot, never to return.

“She should have stood up for the one person who saved her life. Instead, she decided to stay away. She could have at least called once…” Menoka’s plaint trailed off.

The “slim woman in her early 20s, with flowing hair” refused to come out and help in the prosecution of the five accused, despite repeated pleas from the police. In the absence of the key witness, the case lurched from one controversial disclosure to another.

The mystery woman may never come out with her story, but a deep sense of guilt is something she must be living with, feel psychiatrists.

“She was initially in a state of shock, which later gave way to phobia, fearing the worst if Bapi had not come to help her that night. The phobic feeling might have given way to reactive depression and she might be blaming herself now for Bapi’s death,” feels psychiatrist Ranadip Ghosh Roy, who has been following the case closely.

Trying to get into the mind of the woman who never identified herself, medical experts feel she might have wanted to come out with the truth, but was stopped by her family, fearing the implications of making her plight that night public.

“She must have been stopped by her family. After all, such cases can take an ugly turn during cross-examination. One must not forget the social stigma attached to a woman being teased,” says consultant psychiatrist Bhargavi Bhattacharya. “Moreover, a woman requires a lot of courage to testify,” she adds.

That’s precisely what judge Basudeb Majumder said on Wednesday, while delivering the verdict. It was difficult for a woman to come out into the open in the prevalent social set-up, he observed. “This (her not stepping up) is not unprecedented,” he added.

Neurosurgeon Ajay Agarwal, who spent six days at CMRI trying to revive Bapi Sen, felt “social stigma” more than anything else must have stopped the woman from stepping out of the shadows.