A special Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) court in Pune on Friday convicted two shooters associated with Sanatan Sanstha of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar’s murder in August 2013 and sentenced them to life in prison.
Additional sessions judge A A Jadhav pronounced Sachin Andure and Sharad Kalaskar guilty under the stringent anti-terror law UAPA. Three other Sanatan Sanstha members Virendrasinh Tawade, Sanjiv Punalekar, and Vikram Bhave were acquitted.
“Tawade, Punalekar, and Bhave have been acquitted for want of evidence. The prosecution failed to prove the charges,” said Jadhav. “In the case of Sharad Kalaskar and Sachin Andure, the charges have been proved. They have been held guilty and imprisoned for life.”
Two assailants shot dead Dabholkar, 67, a leading light of the nationalist movement, while he was on a morning walk. Dabholkar founded Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti to campaign against superstition and the caste system.
His killing was the first in a series of assassinations targeting rationalist thought. Kannada scholar and writer M M Kalburgi was murdered in Karnataka’s Dharwad in August 2015. Communist leader Govind Pansare was killed in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur in February 2015. Journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead in Bengaluru in September 2017. The killings were being probed as part of a larger conspiracy to attack rationalist thought.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the probe into Dabholkar’s murder in 2014 after a Bombay high court order. It arrested Tawade in June 2016, calling him one of the masterminds of the murder, apart from shooters and co-conspirators.
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