Mumbai: Former media executive Indrani Mukerjea, accused of murdering her first-born daughter Sheena Bora, says that she instinctively knows as a mother that her child is still alive, claiming there is no evidence to establish her death.
Mukerjea, who has written her version of her life story and the murder case that she is being tried for in her memoir Unbroken, was speaking to ThePrint Monday.
“My instinct at the moment is that I feel she is out there somewhere. I have not met her personally, but it is well established in court that Sheena was alive well after the alleged date of murder,” said Mukerjea, who spent six years and eight months in prison for allegedly murdering her daughter before the Supreme Court granted her bail in May 2022.
“There are several people who claim to have met Sheena, who have gone and filed affidavits in court and even said to the press that yes, we have met (her),” she added.
“Instinctively, intuitively, I feel she is somewhere there because there is nothing to establish that she is not alive, so going by that logic and as a mother I do not wish to believe that Sheena is not alive,” Mukerjea, asserted.
A former human resources consultant and co-founder of INX Media, Mukerjea was arrested by Mumbai Police in 2015 for allegedly murdering 24-year-old Bora in 2012 in a conspiracy with her former husband Sanjeev Khanna, then husband Peter Mukerjea, and her driver Shyamvar Rai.
Mukerjea has stated in her book that she gave birth to Bora after she was raped by her own father in her teens.
According to the prosecution, Bora was strangled to death in a car and her body was burnt in a forest in Maharashtra’s Raigad district.
In January 2020, Mukerjea reportedly alleged in court that the technology used to prove that a skull exhumed in Raigad was that of Bora was “amateurish” and “not befitting scientific process”.
Mukerjea’s lawyer claimed that the technology — Cranio Facial Super Imposition —could only be used to exclude persons rather than conclusively prove identity.
Mukerjea has always maintained that Bora was not murdered and had gone abroad for studies in 2012. However, she could never prove the claim.
According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Mukerjea killed Bora because she was upset over the relationship between Bora, whom she introduced as her sister to people, and Rahul Mukerjea, son of Peter Mukerjea from his first marriage.
The agency alleged that Mukerjea had expressed concern to former husband Khanna, the biological father of her other daughter Vidhie, that if Rahul and Sheena got married, they would end up getting all the Mukerjea property while Vidhie would be left with nothing.
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‘Spent first few days in prison grieving loss of child’
Mukerjea, who was lodged in Mumbai’s Byculla women’s jail, said she spent the first few days in prison wondering about Bora’s whereabouts and thinking that she had lost her child.
“Initially I was dealing with grief. Till the chargesheet came and till the DNA expert came and deposed and I got into the details of it, in my head something had really happened to Sheena. I thought, oh god that must be her body. It is not about who has done it. But it is just dealing with losing a child,” Mukerjea told ThePrint.
“I was first dealing with that grief, then the grief of being abandoned by my family. The third thing was that, who is it, who has done this to my daughter, and for what and why have they framed me for it, and that too after three years. I was processing all of that,” she added.
In Unbroken, which was published last month, Mukerjea has written about how she has been at peace since her friend, Saveena, told her that she spotted Bora at Guwahati airport, and stated that it was the second time that she had been told about her daughter being alive.
“Something changed in me after this information came to the fore. The person I am accused of killing is out and about, while I was rotting in jail. Why hasn’t she come out openly? I don’t know. I am sure there are reasons and pressures holding her back,” Mukerjea has said in her book.
Speaking to ThePrint, Mukerjea said she was “very close” to Bora and that her daughter had never expressed any grievance about her being a “bad mother”.
“There are no good mothers or bad mothers. Any mother at any age will take a bullet for her child. I would do it now, I would do it even when I am 90,” she said.
She added that she is not in touch with her second-born child, son Mikhail, whom she had with a former partner, as he is a witness in her case and has not attempted to establish contact with her.
‘Judged for decisions I took when I was young’
Mukerjea’s book delves into certain traumatic experiences that she claims she went through during her childhood and early adulthood.
She wrote that she was raped by her father at the age of 14 and then again at 16, and her mother failed to take up a strong stand in her favour. According to Mukerjea, this is how she became pregnant with Bora.
At 18, Mukerjea decided to move out of Guwahati, where she hails from, for higher studies, leaving her two children, Bora and Mikhail, behind, according to the book.
Mukerjea told ThePrint that people have unfairly judged her for decisions that she took when she was very young.
“At some point in time, you need to look out for yourself as well. When I left Guwahati, people forget that I was just 18. I had not started my life and it was a decision taken by an 18-year-old. Perhaps my decision today could have been different, I don’t know, maybe I would have still done the same thing,” she said.
“People have decided to judge me based on decisions I took at the age of 18 or 21 or 25,” she added, further noting that women are vilified for being ambitious.
In Unbroken, Mukerjea also describes in detail how her second husband, Peter Mukerjea, former chief executive of Star India, and his family “abandoned” her.
Peter Mukerjea was arrested three months after Indrani Mukerjea’s arrest for allegedly being part of the conspiracy to murder Bora. The retired television executive was released on bail in 2020.
The Mukerjea couple ended their marriage of 17 years in 2019 while both were still in prison.
“I can’t stay in a relationship just to keep up appearances,” Mukerjea told ThePrint.
‘Book a catharsis, wrote it in jail’
Mukerjea said that moving from her lavish sea-facing terraced apartment in Mumbai’s upscale Worli to Byculla jail “initially came as a shock”.
She added that she eventually got used to sleeping on the floor and developed a taste for the simple “roti, sabzi (vegetable), dal and rice” served in the jail. According to her, the prison dal was “very nice”.
Mukerjea explained that she wrote Unbroken while in prison on notebooks, putting “ink to paper.”
“We could buy notebooks from the prison shop. I wrote my book in the traditional way… and I wrote it to the precision of punctuation and commas and I would count every page, every word. By the time I was out of prison, I had written 24 chapters and 1,29,000 words. The remaining I wrote once I was out,” she told ThePrint.
Other than her childhood, her marriages, and her relationship with her children, Mukerjea alleged in her book that then Mumbai Police chief Rakesh Maria had “urged her to confess” and had warned her not to “give him attitude”.
“I don’t think much of Rakesh Maria… There must be a reason why Rakesh Maria wasn’t considered suitable enough to carry on with the investigation,” Mukerjea told ThePrint.
Maria was transferred as Mumbai Police Commissioner in September 2015, within days of Mukerjea’s arrest, and was replaced by Ahmed Javed. Maria reportedly described Javed in his book Let Me Say It Now as a “Mukerjea-friendly” Commissioner of Police.
Speaking to ThePrint, Mukerjea asserted that her book was “neither a part of her legal journey nor an image battle”.
“This book is a catharsis and closure for me for all things that were said about me and things that happened in my life,” she said.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)