More than a decade after the tragic murder of rationalist Narendra Achyut Dabholkar, a special CBI Court in Pune on May 10 sentenced his assailants Sachin Prakashrao Andure and Sharad Bhausaheb Kalaskar to life imprisonment for murder and imposed a fine of ₹5 lakh. It, however, acquitted three other accused — alleged mastermind Virendrasinh Sharadchandra Tawade, lawyer Sanjeev Punalekar and his assistant Vinay Bhave due to the failure of both the Maharashtra police and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to procure sufficient evidence.
Additional Sessions Judge Prabhakar P. Jadhav observed that while the two convicts executed the murder, “the main mastermind behind the crime is someone else”. The two convicts hail from Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar (then called Aurangabad district) in Maharashtra. Andure worked as an accountant in a private shop and Kalaskar was a farmer.
Sixty-nine-year-old Dabholkar was shot dead on August 20, 2013, by two motorcycle-borne assailants on the Omkareshwar bridge near Pune’s Shanivar Peth area when he was out on a morning walk. Dabholkar’s murder along with three other similar murder cases — that of communist leader Govind Pansare (February 2015), Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi (August 2015) and Bangalore journalist Gauri Lankesh (September 2017) have sparked national outrage against the targeting of critics of Hindutva and campaigners against superstition and orthodoxy. Activists and stakeholders over the years have demanded a probe into the possibility of a common conspiracy on the ground that the murders appear to be eerily similar.
