Mumbai, Sep 19: The Maharashtra police are probing a possible link in the sensational murders of rationalist and anti-superstition activist Dr Narendra Dabholkar, Leftist leader and secularist Comrade Govind Pansare and Kannada litterateur Prof M M Kalburgi.
On Wednesday, the Special Investigation Team (SIT), mainly comprising officers and men of the Kolhapur police, arrested Samir Gaikwad, a 32-year-old man from Sangli district, in connection with the murder of Comrade Pansare. Gaikwad is a full-timer with the right-wing Sanatan Sanstha, and runs a mobile repairing shop.
Additional Director General of Police Sanjay Kumar, who heads the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), who is supervising the Pansare murder probe, has not ruled out probing the three cases. “As of now he has been arrested in the Comrade Pansare murder case. Slowly and slowly we would look into other aspects as well.”
Asked about the common aspects, a senior Maharashtra police official said: “The three cases are strikingly similar…there were two killers, they rode motorcycle, the murders happened in the home or near the homes, the targets were hit on their heads, it was a clear case of planned murder, the victims were liberals and exponents of same thought. This is enough to indicate a link.”
Meanwhile, Sanatan Sanstha spokesperson Abhay Vartak said that the organisation was being victimised and unnecessarily targeted. “We are behind Samir Gaikwad,” he said, adding that in the past the Sanatan Sanstha had provided government with “valued inputs”. In fact, in 2011, the erstwhile Congress-NCP government headed by then chief minister Prithviraj Chavan proposed a ban on Sanatan Sanstha and sent papers to the Centre, however, it did not materialise.
Common plot?
Dr Narendra Dabholkar, 67, rationalist and anti-superstition activist, of Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS), was shot dead on June 20, 2013, by two unidentified gunmen near Omkareshwar temple in Pune. The government later ensured the passage of the Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, which Dr Dabholkar had been rooting for.
Comrade Govind Pansare, 82, a rationalist and leader of Communist Party of India, 82, and his wife, Uma were attacked by two motorcycle borne youths on February 16, 2015, near his home in Kolhapur, and he died four days later on February 20, 2015, at the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai. He was also the author of the best-selling Marathi language biography of 17th-century Maratha warrior Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Shivaji Kon Hota, literally ‘Who was Shivaji?’
Prof M M Kalburgi, 76, sch-olar and writer, who had run-ins with right-wing Hindutva groups, was shot dead on August 30, 2015, by an unidentified gunman at the former’s residence in Kalyan Nagar locality, Dharwad. Two men, posing as his students, reached his residence on a motorcycle. His wife, Umadevi, answered. As she went inside to fetch coffee for them, one of the men fired two rounds at Kalburgi’s chest and forehead at point blank range, while the other waited outside.
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