23 yrs on, woman gets teacher arrested for molesting her

Kolkata: Twenty-three years after he allegedly molested a student, a schoolteacher in Darjeeling has been arrested, after his victim — who was just 14 at the time — lodged a police complaint.

The 37-year-old woman, who’s a finance lawyer settled in Hong Kong, says she spoke up now after she found out that Jitesh Ojha, who has taught at 20 schools over two decades, was a serial molester who had, over the years, sexually preyed on several students, including a number of juniors from her alma mater.
The case bears strong echoes of the #MeToo movement, in which several powerful men have been accused of sexual predation, often committed several years previously.
The woman lodged the complaint with the Darjeeling Sadar police station in September last year over email, saying she had been molested multiple times for more than a month by Ojha, who gave her private tuitions at her Darjeeling home, more than two decades ago. The cops said it took them more than a year to substantiate the case with evidence and find out witnesses and fresh victims, especially in the midst of the pandemic, before they could nail him. The 46-year-old Ojha, who has a wife and a child, was arrested from his rented home in Siliguri on October 5, and is now in judicial custody.
“We had absolutely no reason to disbelieve the woman,” said Darjeeling deputy SP (town) Rahul Pandey. “But when we first received the complaint from her in September 2019, we began to probe and found that the man had an enviable academic record and was a respected teacher in the community. We sought more details from the victim, and then she mailed us in detail about the kind of physical and sexual abuse she had been subjected to as a young girl. We then began speaking to a number of students and discovered more victims, who had faced similar trauma. We finally managed to gather enough evidence against the man to build a case and arrest him,” Pandey added.
Ojha was taken into police custody for two days, after which he was remanded in judicial custody till October 23. He has been booked under sections 354 (outraging modesty), 506 (criminal intimidation) and 509 (word, gesture or act intended to insult modesty of a woman) of the IPC. The accuser has also presented her statement before a magistrate over video call.
“This is definitely a rare case, where a person has been arrested for an alleged crime committed more than two decades ago,” said city-based criminal lawyer Anirban Guha Thakurta.
The woman spoke to TOI about her decision to speak out about her trauma, and how she mustered courage to speak out after all these years. “As a teen in the small town of Darjeeling in the 1990s, I didn’t have the knowledge or tools to cope with an abuser,” she said. “I didn’t know the difference between a bad and good touch. No one discussed such things in school. Nor did I have the internet to look for information. I was confused and scared, as I tried to cope with an authoritative figure who was forcing himself on me and I didn’t know how to effectively communicate about the incident with my family.”
She said she had moved on and had established a successful career in Hong Kong, when a conversation with some school friends revived sordid memories of her traumatic past. “The man, I learnt, continued to molest young students, especially those attending his private tuitions. I immediately recalled the way he used to inappropriately touch me while threatening me into staying silent, forcibly kissing me while maintaining a steely gaze,” she recounted.
This time, she resolved to not just put an end to her traumatic past, but also to help the girls who were now his victims. While following the case over the past year, she even received threats from the teacher’s family members, she said. “It took me 22 years to find the courage and conviction needed to report the horrific crime. But I wanted to raise my voice today in the hope that my courage would make it more acceptable in society for such issues to be discussed, and so that some other 14-year-old could protest against such sexual abuse and does not have to face the trauma I have been facing for the last 23 years.” 

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