hatched by his rivals in the local Congress unit in Maharashtra, Dr. G.N.Patil (brother of Smt. Pratibha Patil) and Dr. Ulhas Patil (a former Congress MP from Jalgaon). According to her, the duo engaged two intermediaries, Damodar Lokhande and Leeladhar Narkhede, to get Prof. V.G. Patil eliminated. She has named Lokhande and Narkhede as the persons who hired the two assassins, Raju Mali and Raju Sonawane, who were arrested and subsequently chargesheeted by the police. Mysteriously, Mali died in judicial custody on 7 April 2007, just a day before the CBI was scheduled to interrogate him. Accusing the state CID of being tardy and unwilling to probe the role of Dr. G.N. Patil and Dr.Ulhas Patil, Smt. Patil petitioned the Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court to transfer the case to the CBI. Her plea was not only accepted but the court also took cognizance of “the alleged complicity of influential political leaders”. Shockingly, the CBI too has been making every effort to cover up the truth in the case, as is evident from the fact that when it filed a supplementary chargesheet in the court of the chief judicial magistrate, Jalgaon, on 10 June 2008, it mentioned only Sonawane as the accused. Clearly, this was an attempt by the CBI to limit the complicity in this crime to the least important person in the conspiracy. Jethmalani’s impassioned argument When the case came up for hearing in the Bombay High Court today, Shri Mahesh Jethmalani, counsel for Smt. Rajni Patil, prese
