It’s just as well that a convicted rapist on the run after jumping parole has been caught, albeit after a six-year hunt. His act of trying to brazen it out at the interrogation by the Kerala police didn’t last long, but such cockiness clearly shows Bitti Mohanty had some serious help in donning a new identity as well as a cushy nationalised bank job. The fear of how the Indian system can be twisted, particularly with insider help from bureaucrats, is what is most alarming about this escapade that cocked a snook at authority for so long. The fact that his father B.B. Mohanty was a former Orissa DGP must have been of help; the authorities must probe deep into how the senior Mohanty may have aided his son in something unthinkable like getting parole on a family pretext and then being on the lam for six years.
Had Bitti been hiding in a remote village far from the scene of his original crime, Alwar in Rajasthan, the episode may have had little to offer except as a puzzle for the authorities at the jail where he was incarcerated as a convicted rapist for seven years. That Bitti became a free citizen who could easily create another identity as Raghav Rajan, and even manage to secure a job in a public sector bank shows how weak our entire governance system is. We have to wonder how many undertrials and convicts, some of whom could even be rapists, are at large.