How a postmark led police to a writer of threatening letters

The 41-year-old school dropout reportedly accused the writers of being “anti-nationals” and threatening them with dire consequences. A co-convenor of the Hindu Jagarana Vedike, a Sangh Parivar affiliate, in central Karnataka, Jadhav worked in the binding section of a printing press in Davangere.

Since 2022, seven cases had been filed by writers across the state in connection with the threatening letters, including one each by Kum Veerabhadrappa at Kottur Police Station in Vijayanagar district, BL Venu at Chitradurga Layout station and BT Lalitha Naik at Sanjaynagar Police Station; and two each by Banjagere Jayaprakash at Harohalli Police Station in Ramanagara and Vasundhara Bhoopathi at Basaveshwara Nagar Police station in Bengaluru. Some writers had received multiple threats — 19 letters were sent to Veerbhadrappa’s home, while Naik had received three.

Writer Kum Veerabhadrappa filed a complaint at Kottur Police Station in Vijayanagar district. Nineteen threat letters were sent to his home. Wikipedia

Initial police investigations revealed that all the threat letters were handwritten by one “Sahishnu Hindu (Tolerant Hindu)”.

“The letters had the same handwriting. They were posted from different post offices in different districts of the state to evade police detection,” Bengaluru Police Commissioner B Dayananda had said in a statement on September 30.

While the investigators were initially unable to zero in on the accused, they had identified the various post offices from where these letters were despatched to the writers. The police had also obtained the data of cell phones active near these post offices on the day the letters were posted. One anomaly in the post office region led them to Jadhav, police sources said.

While most of the threat letters were sent from post offices in central Karnataka’s Davangere, Chitradurga, Ranebennur and Shivamogga, one was posted from Mandya in southern Karnataka.

“One letter was posted from Kyathanahalli village in Pandavapura in Mandya, which is not a region that sees a lot of Hindutva activity. We discovered that a Hindu Jagarana Vedike meeting was held in the region at the time the letter was posted last year,” a police officer said.

An investigation into the Mandya event revealed that only a handful of the 200 participants were from central Karnataka — the region from where nearly all the threat letters were posted. The police obtained the phone data of these participants and cross-referenced it with the records of mobiles active in central Karnataka post offices on days the earlier threat letters were posted. This helped the police zero in on Jadhav.

“There was CCTV footage from one post office, but there was no way to establish the identity of the person until the lead from the Mandya event was developed,” police sources said.

After Jadhav’s identity was established, the police picked him up from Davangere on September 28. He was produced in a Bengaluru court on September 29 and taken into custody.

“He studied till Class 8 and dropped out of school. He worked in the binding unit of a press for over 25 years and is unmarried. He is an avid reader, and followed the statements and quotes of well-known writers appearing in the media. He wanted to mentally harass (the) writers he saw as being anti-Hindu,” sources said.

As soon as Jadhav was nabbed, he admitted to having written dozens of threat letters and claimed to have acted on his own, police sources said.

Writer BT Lalitha Naik filed a complaint at Sanjaynagar Police Station. She had received three threat letters. Facebook

Jadhav visited public libraries to look at books by the writers he wanted to target to obtain their addresses, which are usually provided in the books, the police said. Jadhav, who wrote all his threat letters in Kannada, called his targets “anti-India, anti-national, traitors”.

In a police complaint filed on July 2, 2022, 78-year-old Naik, a former state minister, activist and writer, said the threat letter she had received also mentioned names of 61 other personalities.

The letter to Naik accused writers and progressive thinkers of wrongly questioning lessons on patriotism, nationalism and national security incorporated in school textbooks during the tenure of the previous BJP government from 2019-2022. The letters also accused the writers of “aligning with anti-national forces”.

The four-page letter to Naik said that she had attended events of groups like the PFI and SDPI. “If you attend anti-national events in future, you will be putting your life in danger,” the letter had warned.

Sanjaynagar police booked a case of criminal intimidation and causing intentional insult to breach peace under the Indian Penal Code.

After Jadhav’s identity was established, the police picked him up from Davangere on September 28. He was produced in a Bengaluru court on September 29 and taken into custody.

After the writers approached Chief Minister Siddaramaiah over the threat letters, Bengaluru police constituted a crime branch special investigation team (SIT) in August on directions of state police chief Alok Mohan.

The writers had told CM Siddaramaiah that if “the threats are not taken seriously, the situation faced by Gauri Lankesh and M M Kalburgi could arise again”.

Lankesh, 55, an activist and journalist, and Kalburgi, 77, a prominent scholar in Karnataka, were shot dead in September 2017 and August 2015 respectively by members of an extremist Right-wing Hindutva group who projected them as being “anti-Hindu”.