Special court sentences two to life imprisonment, acquits three in Dabholkar murder case

Mumbai: A Pune sessions court on Friday convicted two and acquitted three accused persons in the 11-year-old murder of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar. However, the rationalist’s son Hamid said the fight is far from over as the prosecution has failed to find the mastermind behind the murder. He will challenge the acquittal of the three accused persons, who were the conduit between the mastermind and assailants, Hamid said.

Rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, founder of Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS), was shot dead by two assailants during a morning walk in Pune in 2013. The murder had sparked nationwide debate over the threat to freedom of speech. Subsequently, the country witnessed three similar murders — communist leader Govind Pansare in February 2015, Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi in August 2015 and Bangalore journalist Gauri Lankesh in September 2017.

“We are satisfied that the two accused have been convicted. But three accused persons have been acquitted for lack of evidence and the investigators have not been able to expose the masterminds behind the murder. Our fight will not be over till the arrest of the three acquitted accused and masterminds. Now it is clear that the murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Pansare, Lankesh and Kalburgi were part of a larger conspiracy. All murders have similar modus operandi and the masterminds are the same. We will challenge the acquittals in Bombay High Court,” Hamid said.

Special judge P.P. Jadhav held Sahin Andure and Sharad Kalaskar guilty of shooting Dabholkar to death. The remaining three accused persons — Dr Virendrasinh Tawade, Sanjeev Punalekar and his aide Vikram Bhave — were acquitted for insufficient evidence against them.

Andure and Kalaskar were sentenced to life imprisonment along with a penalty of Rs five lakh. Both of them are also accused in the Govind Pansare murder, while Kalaskar is also an accused in the murder of Gauri Lankesh.

The investigation into the Dabholkar murder cases has seen several twists and turns in the last 11 years. Initially, the police had arrested alleged firearms peddler Manish Nagori and his aide Vilas Khandelwal. Both were arrested by the Thane police in an extortion case on the same day of Dabholkar’s murder. They were later handed over in the custody of Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad, which had taken over the investigation into the Dabholkar case.

The ATS claimed it recovered 40 firearms after Nagori’s interrogation and one of them matched with the markings on a cartridge seized from the Dabholkar murder spot. However, that theory changed after the Central Bureau of Investigation took over the case in June 2014 as directed by the Bombay High Cour. In a recent report given to the court, the CBI said no “prosecutable evidence” was found against the two.

In June 2016, the CBI arrested ENT surgeon Dr. Virendrasinh Tawde, who was linked to a radical organisation ‘Sanatan Sanstha’, based on a statement given by Hindutva activist Sanjay Sadvilkar. Interestingly, Tawde was already arrested in the Pansare murder case.

The central probe agency filed a chargesheet against Tawde in September 2016. In the chargesheet, the agency named Sanatan Sanstha members Sarang Akolkar and Vinay Pawar as the two assailants who shot dead Dabholkar.

However, one more twist came in the case in August 2018, when the CBI arrested Andure and Kalaskar as the assailants in Dabholkar case.

In May 2019, CBI arrested Mumbai-based Sanatan Sanstha lawyer Sanjeev Punalekar and his aide Vikram Bhave. It claimed that in July 2018, Punalekar had advised Kalaskar to destroy the firearm used in Dabholkar’s murder. The agency then hired a foreign agency to retrieve the weapon from Thane creek and in March 2020 claimed to have recovered a pistol from the creek. However, subsequently the investigating officer informed the court the weapon used in Dabholkar’s murder was not recovered.

Dabhoklar’s daughter Mukta was present in the court with her brother when the judge pronounced his order. After the verdict, she said. “This is an important verdict. We will move the high court against the acquittal of the three accused persons. They were involved in three more similar murders. Therefore it is important for all those families.”

Chetan Rajhans, spokesperson of Sanatan Sanstha said, “We respect the verdict given by the court today. It has proven that the seekers of Sanatan Sanstha were innocent. The conspiracy of Urban Naxals to prove Sanatan Sanstha a Hindu terrorist organisation has failed. Andure and Kalaskar are neither office bearers of Sanatan Sanstha nor directly involved in any of Sanstha’s activities. But we strongly feel that they too were falsely implicated in this case.”