A poser to President Pratibha Patil

“The care, diligence and empathy with which the judiciary protects, even a lone individual who has truth on his side, invests the judiciary with a superior purpose and a higher moral authority… A very heavy responsibility is cast on the judicial fraternity to uphold the majesty of justice. Courts are respected as temples of justice and the judicial fraternity regarded as custodians of law and dispensers of justice. This precious trust cannot be allowed to be eroded.” Further, you spoke for millions of victims of judicial delays when you said, “The case disposals are excruciatingly time consuming. This agonising delay has rendered the common man’s knock on the doors of justice a frustrating experience… Time has come when we as stakeholders, without being unduly touchy and sensitive to criticism, have to collectively introspect the causes of the ills of judicial administration and find solutions squarely. Only then posterity will remember us that we did our duty to our nation.”

Your sagacious speech has emboldened me to write this open letter to you as a conscientious citizen of India and also as a public-spirited columnist to bring to your kind attention a matter of exceptional importance. It is a matter in which you, as the Custodian of the Constitution, are called upon to pay heed to your own words of exhortation, since it concerns your own brother’s alleged involvement in a heinous crime. It is the hope of ordinary citizens like me that you will not be “unduly touchy and sensitive to criticism”, just as it is also our hope that President Pratibha Patil will overrule whatever considerations Sister Pratibha Patil might have in this matter.

As you are well aware, troubling questions have emanated from the ongoing hearing in the Bombay High Court in the Jalgaon murder case. It pertains to the killing of Prof V G Patil, the then president of the Congress in Jalgaon, your home district, on September 21, 2005. The slain leader’s widow, Rajni Patil, has filed a petition contending that her husband’s murder was the result of an intra-party political conspiracy, hatched by his rivals — Dr G N Patil (your brother, who had been defeated by Prof V G Patil in the election for the office of DCC president, and into whose alleged corrupt practices Prof Patil had started an investigation) and Dr Ulhas Patil, a former Congress MP. She has also contended that the duo worked through two intermediaries, Damodar Lokhande and Leeladhar Narkhede, to hire two contract killers, Raju Mali and Raju Sonawane.

Anyone who has followed the case closely, as this columnist has, would have no difficulty in seeing a scandalous attempt, right from the beginning, to cover up the truth. Taking cognizance of “the alleged complicity of influential political leaders”, the Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court transferred the case from the state CID to the CBI in February 2007. Soon, thereafter, Mali, whom the police had named as the principal assassin, died mysteriously while in judicial custody. Since July last year, the CBI’s investigation is being monitored by the High Court in Mumbai. In almost every single hearing, the court has rapped the CBI for its tardy and unsatisfactory progress. Reacting to the agency’s dogged refusal to subject Lokhande and Narkhede to narco tests, the court even remarked, “If the CBI can conduct such tests on suspects in the Arushi Talwar case, why not in this case? Why are you adopting double standards — one in Delhi and another in Maharashtra? Or are you doing so only in this particular case?”

Indeed, even without narco tests, the CBI has collected copious and compelling evidence against G N Patil, Ulhas Patil, Lokhande and Narkhede, sufficient to name them in its chargesheet and make them stand trial. Mobile phone records; a letter written by Mali and Sonawane from inside the jail naming G N Patil and Ulhas Patil as the “masterminds” of the murder; Mali’s reiteration of the same in an interview to Aaj Tak TV channel; damning statements by his wife Rekha Mali and her brother that they regularly received money from G N Patil, Lokhande and Narkhede while Mali was in jail — all this and more is part of the evidence collected by the CBI.

Then there is an eye-witness statement by one Rambhau Pawar, who tried to intervene when the crime was being committed but had to flee when Mali shouted at him: “Yahan se bhag nahin to tera bhi yehi haal karenge. Hamare peechhe netaon ke haath hain. Bharosa nahi hai to jaan le ki hamare peechhe Ulhas Patil, G N Patil, Ramesh Chaudhary (a local Congress MLA) ke haath hain”. Pawar’s diary, in which the whole incident has been described, is now with the CBI.

In spite of the mounting evidence in its possession, the CBI last month filed a chargesheet in which it named only Sonawane, a lowly accomplice of Mali, as the accused, and left out your brother and the other three persons. This, Respected Rashtrapatiji, lends credibility to what Mahesh Jethmalani, counsel for Rajni Patil, has stated in his written submission before the court last week: “There is a conspiracy at the highest levels of power to suppress the truth and protect those guilty of conspiring to murder. The criminal justice system has obviously failed in the instant case. The petitioner, already widowed by a pernicious conspiracy to commit murder, will be further widowed in her attempt to seek justice if the courts of this country abandon her and permit powerful politicians; protected by even more powerful ones, to get away with murder.”

Mahamahim, this is a case in which injustice is not only being done, but is also being seen to be done. The stench of the CBI being misused by its political bosses is too strong to ignore. Before the needle of suspicion begins to point toward uncomfortable directions, one hopes that you send out a clear message to the investigating agency as well as to the judiciary that they should do their job impartially, without fear or favour.

Yours respectfully,

(Write to: sudheenkulkarni@gmail.com)