FPJ EXCLUSIVE| Govind Pansare Murder: Supreme Court upholds order on probe transfer to ATS

The Supreme Court has upheld the Bombay high court’s August 2022 order directing the Maharashtra Criminal Investigation Department’s special investigation team (SIT) to hand over further probe in the February 2015 murder of rationalist and Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Govind Pansare, to the state’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), dismissing a special leave petition challenging the order by a case accused.

The HC order had come on August 3, 2022, after Pansare’s family had approached it with a request to hand over further probe in the case to the ATS in view of the fact that the SIT had failed to apprehend the two absconding alleged shooters in the case and the masterminds of the conspiracy.

HC order was challenged by an accused

The HC order was challenged by an accused, Sharad Kalaskar. Turning down the petition challenging the HC order, the SC, in a recent order, said, “We are not inclined to interfere with the impugned. We dismiss the special leave petition while giving our imprimatur to the order.”

The order was given by a two-judge bench of the SC, Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Abhay S Oka. The petition was heard on January 23.

Pansare was shot on February 16, 2015, in Kolhapur, and succumbed to his injuries a few days later, on February 20.

Pansare's family said ATS's breakthroughs helped crack murders of 4 rationalists

His family had also contended before HC that it was the ATS’s breakthroughs in a case investigated by it in 2018, the Nalasopara arms explosives seizure case, which led to the cracking of the cases related to the murders of four rationalists in Maharashtra and Karnataka between 2013 to 2017, including the Pansare case and the August 20, 2013 murder of Dr Narendra Dabholkar in Pune.

The HC order was given by a division bench of Justices Revati Mohite Dere and Sharmila Deshmukh. The probe in the case was transferred to the ATS seven years after Pansare’s murder.

Pasare's family sought transfer of the case to ATS

The SIT was constituted in 2015, in the wake of the HC order passed on a plea filed by Pansare’s family members, seeking such a special team. The CID was probing the case and had arrested a few accused.

In its application to the HC, Pansare’s family had sought the transfer of the case to a dedicated team of the ATS, to “identify masterminds as well as shooters of Comrade Govind Pansare” and cooperation in the subsequent probe by the SIT as well as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which was probing the Dabholkar case.

Advocate for Pansare's family said gravity behind murder was unearthed after ATS filed charge sheet in Nalasopara case

Advocate Abhay Nevagi, appearing for Pansare’s family, had submitted before the HC, “The real breakthrough in all the murder cases—of Dr Dabholkar, Comrade Pansare, Dr MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh—came when the Maharashtra ATS investigated the Nalasopara case.

Though the CBI had named Sarang Akolkar and Vinay Pawar (also alleged shooters in the Pansare case) as accused in the Dr Dabholkar case, it however, subsequently dropped their names at the time of filing of the supplementary charge sheet on February 13, 2019.

As it had transpired that two of the accused arrested in the Nalasopara case, Sharad Kalaskar and Sachin Andure, were in fact the alleged shooters in Dabholkar case.”

Nevagi had further argued that the ATS’s Nalasopara case charge sheet of February 18, 2019, had revealed the gravity of the four rationalists’ murder cases, that the accused arrested in the four cases and the Nalasopara case were allegedly “front-line accused” and that there allegedly existed a common, sophisticated network of criminals behind the four murders.

Nevagi had submitted that the charge sheets in the five cases, including the four murder cases and the Nalasopara case, revealed that the offences were allegedly “inter-connected and that the same weapons were used in the murders of Dr Dabholkar, Comrade Pansare, Dr Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh.”

The assassinations

While Dr Dabholkar was shot dead by two bike-borne assassins in 2013, Kannada scholar-academician Kalburgi was shot dead at Dharwad, Karnataka, on August 30, 2015, while on September 5, 2017, editor-rationalist Lankesh was killed in Bengaluru, Karnataka. 

Last month, in a Kolhapur case, charges were framed against 10 accused in the Pansare case. Three of the Pansare case accused — Virendrasinh Tawade, Kalaskar and Andure — are also under scanner in the Dabholkar case.