SCARS THAT RUN TOO DEEP: Anjana Mishra on a hunger strike outside the CBI office, Bhubaneswar

You would have thought reports of sexual assault, in the Big Bad Nineties, were frequent enough to pass mention. But on February 2, 2000, familiarity with such incidents didn’t stop countless office workers, college students, social activists and journalists from milling in the narrow corridors of the Bhubaneswar court, in the centre of the Orissa capital, waiting to hear for themselves the final verdict in what was one of the most sensational cases of molestation in the decade. You could hear a pin drop as chief judicial magistrate S.Nayak pronounced Indrajit Ray, the disgraced advocate general of Orissa, guilty. Ray — who had already been charge-sheeted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probing the case on the order of the Orissa High Court — was sentenced to three years rigorous imprisonment for attempting to rape Anjana Mishra, the estranged wife of an Indian Forest Service officer. (Ray had called Mishra to his official residence in Cuttack on July 11, 1997 to “discuss” a dowry torture case she had filed against her husband and in-laws. But when she’d got there, she had been taken into his bedroom and sexually assaulted.)

Newspapers across the country lauded the ruling as exemplary, hoping it would deter the powerful from taking advantage of vulnerable women in the future.

Four years on, Ray is a free man. Well, very nearly. Despite the court order, the former advocate general was never thrown into jail. In fact, he was released on bail within hours of the sentence being passed. A state bar council’s order to suspend his legal licence for gross misconduct was revoked as well. For the former advocate general, it’s now business as usual. He is back in court, practising as a criminal lawyer. Sacked as chief minister by Congress president Sonia Gandhi in the late Nineties for misrule — and especially for his open support for his long-time friend Ray, — J.B.Patnaik, too, is back in the saddle. He was recently made the Orissa Pradesh Congress Committee president by the party boss who is clearly willing to take advantage of his political cunning to checkmate the ruling BJP-Biju Janata Dal coalition in the upcoming assembly elections in the state.

With the spotlight shifting from Ray to C. Venkataramana, the chairman-cum-managing director of the Bhubaneswar-based NALCO, accused of molesting a woman employee in a Mumbai hotel, the Anjana Mishra case has all but slipped from public memory not just in Orissa, but everywhere else.

“Indrajit Ray has not spent a single day in jail even though he was sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment. It’s a shame,” Mishra, 34, says, dejected. “The country’s criminal justice system does not work in favour of victims.”What’s worse, Mishra has no idea what’s happened to her case. In the last four years, she has written several letters to the CBI and staged sit-ins in front of the agency’s office in the Orissa capital, but to no avail. “They haven’t still bothered to reply to me on the fate of my case. It seems the CBI has lost all interest in the case,” she says.A CBI source says Ray filed an appeal against the sentence in the district and session’s judge’s court in Bhubaneswar on February 19, 2000. “It’s been dragging on since. Some 20 hearings have already taken place. No one knows how long it will take for the court to issue a ruling on the appeal, which we have challenged.”

Not surprisingly, Mishra has lost all hope that her attacker — who is not only well connected but well versed in law — will ever be brought to justice. “If it takes so long in a district court, no one knows how long it will take in the high court and the Supreme Court,” she mourns. But then, that’s how the country’s legal system works., with victims often finding themselves on the receiving end of the penalty for a crime. Little wonder that most sexual assault cases die a natural death—after the dust settles and the noise fades away. The conviction rates in molestation or attempted rape cases are very low because they are harder to prove compared to rape, legal experts say. Even if an accused gets convicted, he can always appeal to the higher court — as Ray has done — and keep the case going unendingly, with justice eluding the victim.

“It was a high-profile case involving an advocate general, so it got wide media coverage. But it has still got nowhere,” Asim Amitava Das, secretary of the Orissa High Court Bar Association, says. Women activists agree. “If Anjana Mishra, an English-speaking woman from an affluent family, cannot get justice despite fighting doggedly with support from the media, you can imagine what happens to scores of other victims from poorer families, whose plight hardly finds a mention in the newspapers,” Namita Panda, chairperson of the Orissa state women commission, says. Bhimasen Sahoo, secretary of the Orissa State Bar Council, says the disciplinary committee of the council had suspended Ray in October 1998 for gross misconduct. “But he later approached the Bar Council of India, which stayed the suspension order, so he can now practise as a lawyer.”Adish C. Agarwal, vice-chairman of the Delhi-based Bar Council of India, defends the stay. “A state bar council should issue a show-cause notice to an accused lawyer and give him a chance to defend himself. Only then can it suspend or cancel his licence. But such procedures were not followed in this particular case.”Phone calls to Ray’s home in Bhubaneswar for an interview were never returned. But lawyers at the Orissa High Court feel it’s not proper for an attempted rape convict to start practising until his name is cleared by the higher court. “All I can say that a person sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment should be too embarrassed to return to court as a lawyer,” Das says. Mishra, meanwhile, is trying hard to get on with her life. Her aroused interest in the law has prompted her to tackle the LLB at Utkal University. In her apartment in Bhubaneswar’s upscale Nayapalli, she has started a counselling centre for women in distress. ‘Ansu’, Oriya for ‘the beginning’, is what the centre is called. Here, she says, she advises women, “some of whom are cursed with a fate worse than mine”.

True, her life is a long litany of woes. Married at the age of 17 to an Indian Forest Service officer from Sambalpur, she was tortured for more dowry. She was banished to the mental hospital in Ranchi when she questioned her husband’s dalliance with his elder brother’s wife.

Rescued from the Ranchi hospital by some women activists she had managed to reach, she spent days at a destitute home in Cuttack till Ray tried to take advantage of her vulnerability. As she took on Ray and his powerful cronies in politics, her family, fearing reprisal, virtually disowned her. And then on the night of January 9, 1999, Mishra was stopped and gang-raped by three youths as she was headed to Cuttack in a car to see her lawyer.

While two of the accused were arrested and given life, Biban Biswal, the main accused, is still free. “I have gone through hell. I can’t take it any more,” she says. She withdrew the case against her husband and agreed on a divorce in the interest of their two children. “My sons are growing up. I didn’t want them to see their parents scream at each other in court.”

Though she puts up a brave front and dresses well, she says something has died insider her, for ever. “I feel like a living corpse at times,” she says, her eyes moist. But why not put the past behind her and start anew? “No, the scar is too deep. How can you lead a normal life anyway when you know that the perpetrator of the crime is roaming free in the same city where you live,” she says.