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?”

... contd.