Narendra Dabholkar Murder Case: Â The court verdict has come after 11 years in the Narendra Dabholkar murder case. The special court for cases related to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in Pune, Maharashtra, on Friday convicted two people and sentenced them to life imprisonment in the murder case of Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, an activist fighting against superstition, and acquitted three including the main accused Virendra Singh Tawde. Dabholkar (67), who had gone for a morning walk on the Omkareshwar Bridge in Pune, was shot dead on 20 August 2013.
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Reading out the order in a packed courtroom, Additional Sessions Judge (Special Court) P.P. Jadhav said the prosecution had proved the charges of murder and conspiracy against Sachin Andure and Sharad Kalaskar and sentenced them to life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 5 lakh. According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Andure and Kalaskar had shot Dabholkar.
The court acquitted the accused ear-nose-throat (ENT) surgeon Tavade, Sanjeev Punalekar and Vikram Bhave due to lack of evidence. During the trial, the prosecution questioned 20 witnesses while the defense questioned two witnesses. The prosecution had said in its final arguments that the accused were against Dabholkar’s campaign against superstition. Initially, the case was being investigated by the Pune Police, but after the order of the Bombay High Court, the CBI took over the case in 2014 and arrested ENT surgeon Tavade, associated with the Hindu right-wing organization Sanatan Sanstha, in June 2016.
According to the prosecution, Tawde was one of the main conspirators in the murder. It claimed that Sanatan Sanstha was opposed to the work done by Dabholkar’s organisation Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti. Tawde and some other accused were associated with this organisation. In its chargesheet, the CBI had initially named fugitives Sarang Akolkar and Vinay Pawar as the shooters but later arrested Sachin Andure and Sharad Kalaskar and claimed in a supplementary chargesheet that they had shot Dabholkar.
Subsequently, the central agency arrested advocates Sanjeev Punalekar and Vikram Bhave as alleged co-conspirators. Virendra Ichalkaranjikar, one of the defence lawyers, had questioned the CBI’s careless attitude towards identifying the shooter during the trial. The accused were booked under sections 120B (conspiracy), 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code, relevant sections of the Arms Act and section 16 (punishment for terrorist act) of the UAPA.
Tawde, Andure and Kalaskar are in jail while Punalekar and Bhave are out on bail. Dabholkar’s murder was followed by three other similar murders of activists in the next four years: communist leader Govind Pansare (Kolhapur, February 2015), Kannada scholar and writer M.M. Kalburgi (Dharwad, August 2015) and journalist Gauri Lankesh (Bengaluru, September 2017). It was suspected that the perpetrators in these four cases were linked to each other.
Date: 20 August 2013, Time: 7:15 minutes, Dabholkar had gone out for a walk and…The Entire Story from murder to the verdict
Dr Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead in Pune on the morning of 20 August 2013. The initial investigation of this incident was done by Pune Police, although later the case was handed over to the CBI. The CBI filed a chargesheet against the accused in 2016.
That morning of 20th August 2013, when Dabholkar had left his house for a walk. When the clock was around 7:15, bike-borne attackers killed Dabholkar. The attackers fired 5 bullets at Dabholkar one after the other, out of which 2 bullets misfired but 2 bullets hit his head and chest. He died as soon as he fell on the ground. The bike-borne attackers fled from the spot after committing this crime.
Police wandered from door to door in search of Dabholkar’s killers
The Dabholkar murder case shook the entire country. During the initial investigation, the police scanned more than 100 CCTV footages near the crime scene, but the accused could not be identified properly due to the blurred images. A witness who saw the incident closely had told that Dabholkar’s attackers fled from there on a bike with the number 7756. During the investigation of this murder, Pune police interrogated 1500 people including about 200 criminals and gangsters lodged in the jails of Nashik, Pune and Thane. According to the information, the police also collected data of 8 crore phone calls from about 16 places. A list of all the black bikes looking similar to the number of the bike mentioned by the witness was also prepared. But even then the police could not get any clue.
How many arrests in Dabholkar murder case?
Three hours after Dabholkar’s murder, the police arrested the first accused. After that, two arms dealers, Manish Nagori and Vikas Khandelwal, were arrested. The police recovered a country-made pistol, two live bullets and four cartridges from both of them. The police sent these weapons to the Forensic Science Laboratory for investigation. The investigation report revealed that the bullets recovered from the spot were fired from Nagori and Khandelwal’s 7.65 mm pistols. It was also found that the bullet marks found on Dabholkar’s body also matched the recovered cartridges.
On 6 September 2019, the CBI filed a supplementary chargesheet in the court against Sharad Kalaskar and Sachin Andure in the Dabholkar murder case. In 2019, the CBI named a man named Vikram Bhave as the mastermind of this murder case. The police, while taking the investigation forward, arrested Sharad Kalaskar and Sachin Andure. Apart from these three, the investigating agency also filed a chargesheet against Vikram Bhave and Sanjeev Punalekar. Let us tell you that Kalaskar, Tawde and Andure are currently in jail, while Vikram Bhave and Punalekar were granted bail.
Why was Narendra Dabholkar murdered?
CBI believes that the main reason behind Dabholkar’s murder was the conflict between Maharashtra Andhashraddha Unmulan Samiti and Sanatan Sanstha. Virendra Tawde, arrested in this case, was associated with Sanatan Sanstha. According to CBI sources, accused Dr. Tawde went to Pune on his bike on 22 January 2013. He was using this bike since 2012. The killers shot Dr. Narendra Dabholkar on 20 August 2013 while sitting on the same bike. Tawde continued to use the bike even after the incident. It was also repaired in a garage in Pune. Later, he also went to Kolhapur with this bike, where Comrade Pansare was murdered in 2015.
