In Delhi Gang Rape Case, a Seasoned Prosecutor

Harish Tyagi/European Pressphoto Agency A protest in Delhi on Jan. 16, a month after the gang rape of a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in the capital.

Rajiv Mohan has little time to spare.

Short and stocky, with broad features spread on an amiable face, his days are packed prosecuting those accused in headline-making cases of murder, extortion and bombings.

To this list, there is a new addition that has India, and the world, watching breathlessly: the trial of five men accused in the fatal gang rape of a young woman in the national capital last month, in an assault so savage it has ignited violent protests an drawn intense media scrutiny and unrelenting public pressure. The defendants could potentially face the death penalty, and Mr. Mohan’s job is to make sure they are convicted. The trial is expected to start Monday.

On Saturday, Mr. Mohan strode into his spartan government office tucked away inside a courthouse in north New Delhi. The late afternoon sunbeams that slipped through the grimy blinds had already dimmed, but a half dozen people awaited his arrival from another court in the city. “He’s very busy,” a court aide whispered reverentially.

Mr. Mohan juggles about six or seven cases in a given day, not unusual in an arthritic judicial system creaking under the weight of too many cases and too few courts. He is currently prosecuting about 110 cases that are pending in an additional sessions judge’s court, a posting he received in 2010 - and 42 more cases on top of that, which were specially assigned to him by the state government from the Delhi po! lice, other states and the country’s top law enforcement agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The figure that could be more relevant to the New Delhi gang rape prosecution, however, is his track record with rape cases. Mr. Mohan said he might have prosecuted 10 to 20 such cases, of which he estimated five or six resulted in conviction.

Mr. Mohan said that in rape cases, the judgment depends on witness testimonies while a rape kit merely corroborates them. If the victim dies, as happened in the New Delhi gang rape, any statement she makes to the police or doctors before her death can be used in the trial. Mr. Mohan noted that if a rape victim dies, but not because of injuries sustained during the rape, then the defendants cannot be convicted based on the victim’s statement. In this case, however, because the young woman succumbed to the injuries she sustained during the rape, Mr. Mohan said he would use her “dying declaration,” which could play a crucial role in obtaining a convicion.

Mr. Mohan could not disclose more details of the New Delhi gang rape case because of a gag order issued by the court.

The Delhi government appointed him to the case from a pool of at least 220 prosecutors who are employed by the state. Although the New Delhi gang rape case will be tried in one of the special fast-track courts that have been set up for rape cases since the brutal Dec. 16 assault, Mr. Mohan said he was appointed only for the gang rape case and would not be staying on with the fast-track court after the suspects in this case are tried.

One of the high-profile convictions Mr. Mohan won was a BMW hit-and-run case, in which an influential businessman from a prominent family, Sanjeev Nanda, was found guilty of mowing down and killing six people in 1999. After the case jostled between courts, Mr. Nanda ultimately received a sentence of two years in prison, a term he has since completed. The case was widely seen as a litmus test of whether the judiciary was capable of p! unishing ! the powerful.

“I enjoy working on challenging cases,” Mr. Mohan said in a telephone interview Friday.

Mr. Mohan’s workload now includes the Geetika Sharma case, in which a young air hostess committed suicide after alleged sexual harassment by a former minister from Haryana, leaving a suicide note blaming him for her death. Mr. Mohan said he was not confident of getting a conviction in that case, saying it would depend on witness testimonies.

“It may be good enough corroborated with other evidence,” Mr. Mohan said of Ms. Sharma’s suicide note. His next meeting in that case is on Thursday.

Other cases he is working on include alleged extortion by Zee News executives. He opposed the executives’ request for anticipatory bail, arguing that, among other things, they had abused the freedom of speech and expression constitutionally granted to the news media. The executives have since been granted bail. He has also tried to subject them to a lie detector test, a request the exectives may consent to after consulting with their doctors. That will be decided Tuesday. Mr. Mohan said he was still waiting for the police to file the charge sheet in the case.

Among other high-profile figures Mr. Mohan is prosecuting are the accused in the New Delhi blasts of 2005 and 2008. He said he was preparing questions for the witnesses as evidence is now being recorded in those cases four or five times a month.

“The witnesses are supporting the case,” he said in his office Saturday. “It’s going well enough.”

Mr. Mohan, 46, grew up in Varanasi, a city on the banks of the Ganges acclaimed for its betel leaves, and has the stained teeth of a chewer to prove it. On his desk lay a betel leaf neatly wrapped in a rubber band next to a stack of files from the New Delhi police. There are no family photographs in his office; a metal almirah that is popular in government offices stands in a corner, three dusty steel cabinets hold hefty hardbound law books with spines broader ! than the ! palm of a hand, and an austere calendar from a law bookstore is tacked to the door.

Mr. Mohan has a string of degrees, including one in law from Kanpur University. He also earned a master’s degree in botany from Purvanchal University in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh. Mr. Mohan started in the New Delhi public prosecutor’s office in 1994 as assistant public prosecutor.

Mr. Mohan said there was “nothing specific” that made him enter law, it just interested him.

Did he ever imagine at the time that he would one day handle some of New Delhi’s most high-profile cases

“Not at all,” he said with a laugh. “I did not expect this.”