Shankar Mishra takes a U-turn, tells court complainant urinated on her own seat

Shankar Mishra, accused of urinating on an elderly woman on an Air India flight last November, told a Delhi court Friday that the complainant urinated on herself because of a medical condition and then blamed him for the act.

"This lady (complainant) is suffering from a medical condition… She urinated on herself and is now blaming Mishra," Mishra's lawyer senior advocate Ramesh Gupta told the court.

The denial comes just two days after Mishra said he was not running away from the fact that the act was an obscene and revolting, however arguing that the complainant's statement does not make a case of using criminal force to outrage her modesty.

Gupta appeared before Additional Sessions Judge Harjyot Singh Bhalla who disposed of a revision petition filed by the police challenging the dismissal of the police custody remand. The court disposed of the petition stating the police were at liberty to approach the concerned court with a fresh police custody remand raising a series of fresh grounds which were raised for the first time before it and not argued before the Metropolitan Magistrate Anamika who initially heard the remand application.

During the hearing, Gupta told the court that the police investigation "was a joke" as it was "impossible for Mishra to access her seat in the business class." He argued before the court that the complainant says that the person who urinated on her was seated in 8A but Mishra was seated in 8C. Even if this was an error on part of the complainant, the police "did not correct this in their remand application."

"He was defamed in front of the whole country, lost his job. Look at the seating pattern, it is impossible for Mishra to have walked over to her seat and urinated on her. It was a business class seat and there was no way to gain entry to her seat. Furthermore, there was another passenger sitting next to her. If Mishra urinated on her, it would have even landed on the passenger who is also a 70-year-old lady. She has made no such complaint," Gupta told the court.

ASJ Bhalla said even he has travelled in business class seats and added, "If you can't cut across doesn't mean you can't come around."

Mishra's lawyers also showed a seating plan to the judge to further buttress their arguments. The judge asked whether the accused was suffering from a prostate problem while dealing with the allegations that it was impossible for Mishra to urinate at the woman from a distance.

The prosecutor had moved the revision petition stating that the accused was in an intoxicated state from the beginning and his custody was required to see if he consumed any intoxicants before the flight. The police also wanted to ascertain the identity of the accused who helped him evade the police.

ASJ Harjyot said, "What do you have to recover? In this case do you need a sample of his urine? The crew would have informed how much liquor would have been given to him. His blood test was not done. There is no way to determine how much alcohol he consumed. The offence is he is unzipping his pants, how are we concerned with what happened before unless there is a case of prior enmity. We have to see the offence. This is not a case of mala fide, that some altercation took place, that he did out of spite."

"What is in the devil's mind is only devil knows," the prosecutor told the court. The judge noted that these grounds were not raised before the Metropolitan Magistrate during the initial remand application.