Decade after Pansare murder, kin await justice

Ten years ago, on February 16, 2015, writer and trade union activist Govind Pansare and his wife Uma were walking back from breakfast at a local shop near their Kolhapur home when two bike-borne men overtook them and opened fire at the couple.

- Abhishek Sharan

MUMBAI: Pansare died of his injuries four days later at Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai and his wife was left partially paralysed.

Pansare's death followed the assassination of fellow rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in Pune on August 20, 2013, and was followed by the murders, in a similar fashion, of Sahitya Akademi Award winner MM Kalburgi in Dharwad on August 30, 2015 and writer publisher Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru on September 5, 2017. These assassinations in a span of five years inflicted a body blow to India's rationalist movement.

In each of the murders—despite the apparently common modus operandi and certain common accused—the investigations have been done by different agencies resulting in a lack of coordination and delay, allege families.

"The two absconding shooters in my father-in-law's murder, Sarang Akolkar and Vinay Pawar, are yet to be caught despite they being identified by my mother-in-law before the Maharashtra police's Special Investigation Team (SIT)," says Pansare's daughter-in-law Dr Megha Pansare who teaches at Shivaji University in Kolhapur.

"Those who approved of the killings of Comrade Pansare and three other rationalists in Maharashtra and Karnataka, as part of a larger conspiracy, are yet to be identified," adds Megha Pansare, citing a Pune court's order which convicted the two shooters who killed Dabholkar but also underscored the two men were just hired gunmen and not the actual conspirators. "Who are these masterminds and planners, and when will they get identified?" said Megha Pansare.

On Thursday, to mark a decade of the murder, retired Bombay high court judge BG Kolse-Patil will deliver a lecture in Kolhapur, titled, 'When will Pansare get justice?'

Pansare's murder has so far been probed by three Maharashtra police units—Kolhapur's Rajarampuri police station, the SIT and the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS).