The threat-letter writer, who harassed several prominent writers of the State for over a year, was finally arrested this September. It has now emerged that the accused, Shivaji Rao Jadhav, 41, from Davangere, was befriended by Sujith Kumar, who allegedly worked as a recruiter for the gang that allegedly killed M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh.
According to the investigating agencies, Sujith Kumar, hailing from Shikaripur, Shivamogga district, known by his aliases Praveen and Manjunath, was known to be identifying youths - mostly those in Hindutva groups and highly motivated and capable of committing crimes - and grooming them.
He allegedly “brainwashed” them and recruited them into the gang, with most of those leading it linked to Goa-based Sanatan Sanstha and its sister-organisation Hindu Janjagruti Samiti, which allegedly killed four writers and activists in Maharashtra and Karnataka between 2013 and 2017.
He is listed as accused number 13 in the chargesheet filed by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) in the Gauri Lankesh case and is presently in judicial custody, even as the trial is under way.
The chargesheet alleges that Parashuram Waghmore, the alleged shooter of Gauri Lankesh, was recruited by Sujith Kumar.
“Shivaji Rao Jadhav’s name and his old phone number were found in a diary recovered from Sujith Kumar during his arrest in 2018. Shivaji confessed to have known him and to have met him multiple times. He confirmed the person by looking at his photograph, but he knows him by the name of Manjunath,” a senior Central Crime Branch (CCB) official, probing the threat-letter case, told The Hindu.
“He was definitely marked out as one of the potential recruits by Sujith Kumar. Shivaji claims he did not know of the murders. But if Sujith was not arrested by the SIT in 2018, probably he may have groomed Shivaji further and may have used him to carry out some offence. But that is hypothetical,” the officer said.
A Class VIII dropout, Shivaji Rao Jadhav was an office-bearer of the Hindu Jagarana Vedike in Davangere and was working in a printing press. He claims he was a regular reader of newspapers in a library nearby, apart from books that valourised Hindutva ideology, which prompted him to write the threat letters to several writers who were critical of the same. He had written multiple threat letters to Kum. Veerabhdrappa, B.T. Lalitha Nayak, Vasundhara Bhupati, Banjagere Jayaprakash, B.L. Venu, and seer Nijagunananda Swamy, before he was arrested.
Security risk
The SIT that busted the module that murdered not only M.M. Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh, but also Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare in Maharashtra, recovered multiple diaries in which the key accused Amol Kale, Sujith Kumar, and Manohar Edave had written down their hit list and also the names, code names, and phone numbers of several individuals.
Many accused, including the alleged shooter of Gauri Lankesh, were arrested following leads from these diaries.
Not all those mentioned in these diaries were involved in these murder cases. However, given that all these were probably various stages of being “recruited”, the SIT made a list of these names and flagged them to the State and the Central agencies, hoping they would be watched and suitable action taken.However, as is evident in the letter-writer case, not much seems to have been done on this list, a senior official said.
“The history of the gang that killed the four activists shows that it was first led by Veerendra Tawde, who was arrested by the CBI in connection with the Narendra Dabholkar case in 2016, following which Amol Kale led the gang. Now that gang carried out two more assassinations in Karnataka. Now that gang has also been busted. But this gang itself seems like a follow-up to another module that carried out multiple bomb blasts in Goa and Maharashtra, which was also busted. Many suspects from this earlier module remain missing even to this day. So this module has a history of regrouping, which makes it a security threat to be watched out for,” a senior official in the know said.
