Ahmednagar Dalit killings: Cops arrest family member who filed complaint, parents claim foul play

It may be recalled that in the afternoon of October 21, dead bodies of Sanjay Jagganath Jadhav (42), his wife Jayshree (38) and their only son Sunil (19) were found in pieces in a well located about half a kilometer from their residence in Wagh Vasti, a hamlet in the Javkhed Khalsa village.

Police said that Prashant is the nephew of the deceased Sanjay Jadhav. Police produced the suspect before a local court in Pathardi. The court remanded him to police custody till December 13 for further investigation. Police said that vehicle, weapons and clothes used during the crime have been recovered. Police said that some internal dispute within the family was the reason behind the brutal murder. It is being probed how and with whose help the suspect Prashant Jadhav planned and executed the gruesome murder. Police are also probing whether the suspects hired the killers by paying supari money in this case.

However, parents of the deceased Sanjay Jadhav claimed that police have made false arrests in this case. Sanjay’s mother Sakharbai told media persons that police should arrest the real culprits. Even activists from various Dalit and social groups claimed that police have arrested a family member “under pressure”. Activists claimed that initially the investigation was delayed and now a family member has been arrested only to “show” detection. Some family members of the Jadhavs had recently made statements on news channels that they were being harassed by the probe teams for admitting involvement in murder.

Police said that the case was sensitive and arrest was made only after proper evidence was obtained against the suspect Prashant Jadhav. Inspector General of Police Salunke said that arrest was made following crucial evidence obtained from brain mapping and forensic tests. Police had conducted tests on six persons including Jadhav and other family members of the deceased.

Police were also working on clues like the photograph of a girl recovered from teenager Sunil’s cell phone and an account on social networking site. Police were also verifying whether the deceased persons had any dispute with on any issue in the past. Police said while various angles were being probed, the investigation team were already suspecting the role of someone from the family or from the village because it was not possible to commit such a planned murder without help from an insider they said.

The family was probably sleeping when the killers struck them with hard, sharp objects in the early hours. They chopped the bodies of the men with a hacksaw or a cutter, and dumped some of the remains in the well and the rest in a borewell ditch. Jayshree’s body,in one piece, was recovered from the well with an injury on the head.

Though the police suspected that only someone knowing the family and the village area well could do such a planned act, they applied the section of the Atrocities Act in the offence. Later on during the course of investigation, police had filed an application before the court to remove these sections of the act. Police sources say they have got important leads in investigation like information about the vehicle and weapons used for crime.

Meanwhile, there was a major unrest among the Dalit and social organisation across the country and even abroad. Apparently, the banned Naxal outfit, communist party of India (CPI- Maoist) issued a press release asking the Dalits to launch a resistance movement against the Brahmanical Hindu facists in the view of Javkhed Khalsa killings. The Maoists have even asked the Dalits to give a befitting reply.

Police claimed that Maoists are using the incident of Ahmednagar killings for misleading the Dalit movement. Police said that Maoists want to penetrate into Dalit groups for spreading their ideology of armed struggle against the government. Some Dalit groups however saw it as a conspiracy by the police to hide their failure in stopping atrocities against Dalits.

Activists from Dalit agitations had drawn a parallel with another triple murder in a Dalit family in Sonai village, also in Ahmednagar, in 2013. One member of that family had been in a love affair with a girl from an upper caste. There too, the bodies had been chopped to pieces and dumped in a nearby well. A senior police officer said that triple murder in Javkhed Khalsa is a heinous crimes, but rather than caste it appears to be a fall out of internal dispute in the family.