Rajendra Jakkal, twenty-five, Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar, twenty-one, Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap, twenty-three, and Munawar Harun Shah, twenty-one, were commercial art students at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya on Tilak Road in Pune. They had a reputation on the campus for drinking and for stealing motor scooters before any of the killings began. Between January 1976 and March 1977 the four of them killed ten people in six separate incidents, along with robberies and dacoities, in what the Supreme Court of India later called a sprawling criminal conspiracy.
The first victim was a classmate, Prakash Hegde, whose father, Sundar Hegde, ran a small restaurant called the Vishwa behind the college. The four planned to kidnap him for ransom. On January 15, 1976, with another student named Suhas Chandak, they picked him up on a false pretext, took him to a tin shed on Karve Road and made him write a note saying he was leaving home. They gagged him and killed him the following night at Peshwe Park.
Housebreakings followed. On the night of October 31, 1976 they forced their way into Achyut Joshi's house in the center of the city and strangled Joshi, his wife Usha and their teenage son Anand with nylon rope, taking a watch, a mangalsutra and several thousand rupees. On December 1, 1976 they entered the Smriti bungalow on Bhandarkar Road and killed five people: the Sanskrit scholar Kashinath Shastri Abhyankar, eighty-eight; his wife Indirabai, seventy-six; their maid, Sakubai Wagh, sixty; their granddaughter Jai, twenty-one; and their grandson Dhananjay, nineteen. The tenth victim was Anil Gokhale; the published accounts do not describe the circumstances of his death.
The case broke when Chandak told the police what he knew and became an approver, and property stolen from the Joshi and Abhyankar houses was recovered. The trial, which the press called the Joshi-Abhyankar massacre case, opened in the Pune district and sessions court on May 15, 1978 and ran for more than four months. On September 28, 1978 the additional sessions judge, W. N. Bapat, sentenced all four to death. The Bombay High Court confirmed the sentences on April 6, 1979, and the Supreme Court dismissed their special leave petitions on November 17, 1980. A mercy petition to the President was refused.
Shah was original accused number four, and it was his name that went at the head of the reported case. On December 3, 1982 he filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court arguing that the long delay in carrying out the sentence should earn a commutation; Jagtap and Sutar followed in January and April 1983. On April 18, 1983 Justices V. D. Tulzapurkar and Ranganath Misra dismissed them. Part of the delay, they held, was the petitioners' own doing, through successive petitions. Shah and Jagtap had told the court that they had done translation work and written books in jail; the judges answered that such work needed a composed mind and concentrated attention, which, if anything, showed that the fear of death was not weighing on them. The decision is still cited in Indian courts on the question of delay.
The four were hanged together at the Yerawada central jail in Pune, an execution that drew crowds in the city. Most sources give the date as November 27, 1983; one Indian compilation gives October 25, 1983. The figure of ten is the total for the group, and no court apportioned the deaths among the four.