Govind Pansare
Nagpur, Feb. 16: Bike-borne gunmen today shot at a respected Left veteran who has been leading a campaign against a widely detested road tax in Kolhapur as he walked home with his wife, leaving both critically wounded and triggering outrage across political affiliations.
Doctors at Kolhapur's Aster Aadhar Hospital said CPI leader Govind Pansare, who is around 80, and his wife, Uma, in her early seventies, were both "critical but stable and responding to treatment".
"Mrs Pansare has undergone a brain surgery successfully; she had a fracture in her skull and haemorrhage in her brain," Dr Ulhas Damle, of Aster Aadhar Hospital, said in a late-evening bulletin.
Pansare underwent three surgeries. Kolhapur police said at least seven shots were fired at him, but doctors were able to remove all three bullets that pierced his body - in the chest, neck and leg. Two bullets grazed his arms.
Whether the attempt was linked to the anti-tax campaign was not immediately clear but the 9am attack on the couple, as they headed home from morning walk in a quiet residential locality of Sagarmala in the south-west Maharashtra city, left residents of the state searching for answers.
The attack brought back memories of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar's August 2013 murder in Pune. Dabholkar, 65, who had been campaigning for an anti-superstition bill, was out on his morning walk when he was shot.
Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said he had asked police to probe if there was any link between today's attack on Pansare and Dabholkar's murder, which remains unsolved. "The director-general would directly monitor the case; 10 teams of policemen have been formed," the BJP leader said.
Late this evening, reports said Kolhapur police had detained five persons, but there was no official confirmation.
NCP chief Sharad Pawar said it was sad that social activists were being targeted in Maharashtra. "It is a concern and the government should use all its might to crack these cases to restore the faith of people in justice," he said.
Social activist Medha Patkar, too, said the police must probe if there was a "common link" between the attack on Pansare and Dabholkar's murder.
Pansare, a former CPI central committee member and general secretary of the party's state council, a trade unionist, orator, writer and a vocal opponent of fringe Hindutva groups, was currently at the forefront of the anti-toll tax agitation.
The people of Kolhapur have been protesting for the past two years against the tax being levied for the construction of roads inside the city. According to its agreement with local bodies, the infrastructure firm IRB - which has erected several toll booths across the city - would collect the tax for 30 years.
The public campaign, aided by the then Opposition parties, including the BJP, has often turned violent. The BJP had promised to withdraw the tax if it came to power.
In December the new BJP government set up a panel to look into the issue, realising that the IRB could legally challenge any decision to scrap the toll without compensating it for its losses.
Pansare, one of the leaders of a public action committee against the tax, had demanded that the levy be scrapped. But so had most parties cutting across political divides.
With nothing yet to link the tax with today's attack, Kolhapur police, sources said, were looking into Pansare's recent speeches to check if any group had taken offence to his statements.
Pansare had in the past received threats to his life, particularly when he wrote a controversial book some years ago titled Shivaji kon hota? (Who was Shivaji?)
After Dabholkar's August 2013 murder, Pansare had said: "It is wrong to say Maharashtra is a liberal, progressive state."
Police sources said preliminary investigations had revealed that Pansare and his wife were close to their home when the masked suspects came on a motorcycle from behind and opened fire.
Some neighbours, who heard the shots, said they initially thought someone was bursting crackers to celebrate India's victory over Pakistan in the World Cup, but soon saw the couple lying in a pool of blood on the road.
The incident triggered shock-waves and angry protests across the state. Markets remained closed in Kolhapur and many other towns as a mark of protest against the attack on the highly respected leader and thinker, who was among the torchbearers of the unified Maharashtra campaign in the 1950s.
"It's unfortunate that liberal social and political workers are being attacked so brazenly but the state government is unable to nab the culprits," CPI state council general secretary Bhalchandra Kango said in Aurangabad.
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