Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap was one of four commercial art students from Pune, in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, who were sentenced to death for a chain of ten murders committed in the city between January 1976 and March 1977. The case was tried in the sessions court at Poona, as the city's name was then written in court papers, and came to be known in the courts as the Joshi-Abhyankar Massacre case. His co-accused were Rajendra Jakkal, Dilip Dhyanoba Sutar and Munawar Harun Shah. All four were hanged together at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune in 1983.
The four were tried and judged as a group. Jagtap's own voice is heard mainly in the petitions he filed after his appeals had run out. Those papers show a prisoner who spent his years under sentence of death writing and translating in Marathi, and who went back to the Supreme Court of India more than once in the hope that the delay and the work he had done would earn him a sentence of life imprisonment instead. The court's refusal in April 1983 cleared the way for the executions.
At the time of the killings Jagtap was a student of commercial art at the Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya, an art college on Tilak Road in Pune, the Free Press Journal reported in 2020 in a news agency report on the case. Jakkal, Sutar and Shah studied there too. A report by the news agency IANS, written when a television series on the case was announced, said the four had no criminal background and came from middle-class families.
His age at the time, his family and the place of his birth have never been reported. The Supreme Court's 1983 judgment refers to him only by his full name, Shantaram Kanhoji Jagtap, and does not give his number among the accused.
The Supreme Court summed up the prosecution case in a few lines when it ruled on Jagtap's last petition. The offenses, it said, were committed between January 1976 and March 1977 in pursuance of a criminal conspiracy, which resulted in six incidents, ten murders, and acts of robbery and dacoity.
The first death was that of a classmate. According to the Free Press Journal report, the student, whose name it gave as Prasad Hedge, was killed on January 16, 1976. His father ran a small restaurant near the college, and the students kidnapped the young man to extract a ransom from the family. He was strangled.
Nine more people were killed between October 31, 1976 and March 23, 1977, in break-ins at homes in Pune. The same report describes the victims as members of the families whose homes were entered, and says they were suffocated and strangled. Their names are not given in the court record.
The judgment did not divide the ten deaths among the four. What it did say about the three men who were before it in April 1983, Jagtap among them, was that each one had been involved in at least seven of the ten murders. That statement, from the country's highest court, is the clearest measure in the record of Jagtap's own part in the series.
Another man accused in the case turned approver, becoming a witness for the prosecution, the Free Press Journal reported. The date of the arrests has not been established.
On September 28, 1978, the trial court sentenced Jagtap, Jakkal, Sutar and Shah to death. A crowd had gathered at the court premises when the sentence was pronounced, according to the 2020 Free Press Journal report.
The Bombay High Court confirmed the death sentences on April 6, 1979. The four then sought special leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of India, which dismissed the special leave petitions on November 17, 1980. Review petitions were dismissed on February 11, 1981. With that, as the Supreme Court later put it, the normal judicial process in the case came to an end.
Jagtap did not stop there. He and Shah filed fresh writ petitions in the Supreme Court, which were dismissed on February 5, 1982. Jagtap alone then asked the court to review that dismissal, and his review petition was dismissed on April 1, 1982.
Early in 1983 the legal ground shifted. On February 16, 1983, in the case of T. V. Vatheeswaran, a prisoner in Tamil Nadu who had been under sentence of death for more than eight years, two judges of the Supreme Court set aside his death sentence and substituted life imprisonment, treating prolonged delay in carrying out an execution as a reason to spare the prisoner. Jagtap filed a new writ petition on January 17, 1983, a few weeks before that ruling. Shah had filed his on December 3, 1982, and Sutar followed on April 12, 1983.
On March 24, 1983, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Y. V. Chandrachud decided the case of Sher Singh and others from Punjab and rejected the two-year rule drawn from the Vatheeswaran judgment. Delay remained an important factor, the bench held, but no fixed period could on its own entitle a prisoner to commutation. A court had to look at why the delay arose and who was responsible for it, including whether it came from a string of review and writ petitions filed by the prisoner himself. Justice V. D. Tulzapurkar sat on that bench.
The three petitions of Shah, Jagtap and Sutar were heard together by Justice Tulzapurkar and Justice Ranganath Misra. Counsel for the three asked for the death sentences to be commuted to life imprisonment on two grounds: that under the principle laid down by a Constitution Bench, the case was not among the rarest of rare cases in which death should be imposed, and that the petitioners had lived for about five years under a sentence of death.
In support, counsel described what the men had done in prison. Jagtap, the court recorded, had written a book in Marathi titled Kalyan Marg and had translated a book on yoga into Marathi. He was studying Buddhism and translating the Dhammapada, the collection of the Buddha's sayings. Shah, the court was told, was writing the Koran in Marathi and learning Arabic and homeopathy.
The judges turned the argument around. Work of that kind, they said, called for a composed mind and close attention, and it suggested, if anything, that the sentence of death was not weighing heavily on the petitioners. On delay, the court relied on the Sher Singh ruling. The lapse of time was not decisive, it said, though it had to be considered. The normal judicial process had ended only on November 17, 1980, and part of the delay after that had been caused by the petitioners themselves through their successive review and writ petitions. Jagtap's own record of a writ petition, a review of its dismissal and then a new writ petition was part of that history.
The court also rejected the argument that the case did not deserve the death penalty. The manner in which the crimes had been committed and their nature, it held, placed the case within the rarest of the rare category, and the extreme penalty of death was clearly called for. It warned that misplaced leniency in such cases could encourage private revenge and unsettle society.
Counsel for the State told the court that the mercy petitions of the condemned men had been dismissed. On April 18, 1983, the bench dismissed all three writ petitions and directed that the death sentences be carried out without any further loss of time, in accordance with law. The ruling is reported as Munawar Harun Shah v. State of Maharashtra, under the name of the first petitioner.
Jagtap was hanged with Jakkal, Sutar and Shah at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune in 1983. Reports differ on the date. The Free Press Journal and The News Minute, writing in January 2020 as four men convicted in the Delhi case known as Nirbhaya awaited execution, gave it as October 25, 1983. The IANS report of the television series and a 2026 article in The Bridge Chronicle, a Pune newspaper, gave it as November 27, 1983.
The News Minute described the Pune hangings as the last time more than one person had been executed together in India before the Nirbhaya case. Yerwada Central Jail was built by the British in 1851, the Free Press Journal reported in 2026, and Maharashtra prison department records show 35 people hanged there since 1950.
The killings stayed in Pune's memory long after the executions. The Bridge Chronicle listed the case in 2026 among the death-penalty cases that shaped the city's criminal justice history, naming Jagtap among the four men convicted and sentenced to death, whose appeals the Supreme Court rejected.
A Marathi documentary on the case, Jakkal, directed by Vivek Wagh, won the award for best investigative film at the 67th National Film Awards, for films of 2019, according to the list of winners issued by the Government of India. IANS reported that Wagh then spent four years developing a Marathi web series on the same murders, also titled Jakkal, produced by Jio Studios and announced for launch in October 2023. Wagh described Pune as a city known as a pensioners' paradise and its cultural capital, and said the period of the killings had frightened its residents.
The murders also lay behind Paanch, the first feature film directed by Anurag Kashyap. The Statesman reported that the film, said to be based on the 1976 and 1977 Joshi-Abhyankar killings, was shelved in 2003 after the Central Board of Film Certification objected to its violence, its depiction of drug use and its language, and that its producer later said it would finally reach cinemas.
The date of the execution is the main conflict in the record: October 25, 1983 in two 2020 reports, November 27, 1983 in reports from 2023 and 2026. The first victim's name is given as Prasad Hedge in the 2020 news agency report. The names of the nine people killed in the house break-ins, the ages of the four accused, the date of their arrest and the name of the trial judge have not been established. How each of the ten deaths was divided among the four men was not set out; the Supreme Court said only that each of the three petitioners took part in at least seven.
January 16, 1976: a classmate of the four students, reported as Prasad Hedge, is killed after being kidnapped for ransom.
October 31, 1976 to March 23, 1977: nine more people are killed in house break-ins in Pune.
September 28, 1978: the sessions court at Poona sentences Jagtap, Jakkal, Sutar and Shah to death.
April 6, 1979: the Bombay High Court confirms the death sentences.
November 17, 1980: the Supreme Court of India dismisses the special leave petitions.
February 11, 1981: review petitions dismissed.
February 5, 1982: writ petitions by Jagtap and Shah dismissed.
April 1, 1982: Jagtap's petition for review of that dismissal is dismissed.
January 17, 1983: Jagtap files a new writ petition.
February 16, 1983: the Supreme Court decides T. V. Vatheeswaran's case on delay.
March 24, 1983: the Supreme Court decides Sher Singh's case and rejects a fixed two-year rule.
April 18, 1983: the writ petitions of Shah, Jagtap and Sutar are dismissed; the court directs that the sentences be carried out.
October 25 or November 27, 1983: Jagtap and his three co-accused are hanged at Yerwada Central Jail, Pune.
2003: Paanch, a feature film said to be based on the murders, is shelved after censor objections.
67th National Film Awards (films of 2019): the documentary Jakkal wins best investigative film.
October 2023: launch announced for the Marathi web series Jakkal.