‘Activists arrested for Maoist links, not dissent’: SC rules out SIT probe

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Sept 28, 2018 : The Supreme Court on Friday said there is prima facie material to show that five rights activists have links to a banned Maoist group, rejecting arguments that they were arrested for their dissenting views.

 

The court, however, said the lawyer and trade union activist Sudha Bhardwaj, Telugu poet P Varavara Rao, activist Gautam Navlakha, and lawyers Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves will remain under house arrest for more four weeks and can seek bail. They were arrested by the Maharashtra police in country-wide raids on August 28.

The Supreme Court, while hearing a petition filed by historian Romila Thapar and others, on August 29 ordered the activists be kept under house arrest.


The apex court had on September 19 said it would look into the case with a “hawk’s eye” as “liberty cannot be sacrificed at the altar of conjectures”. It had told the Maharashtra government that there should be a clear-cut distinction between opposition and dissent on one hand and attempts to create disturbance, law and order problems or overthrow the government on the other.

Maharashtra Police have said the arrests were part of their probe into an event called Elgar Parishad in Pune on December 31, 2017, when activists and Dalit organisations came together. On January 1, violence broke out at Bhima Koregaon, about 40 km from Pune, as tens of thousands of Dalits celebrated the 200th anniversary of an 1818 war between the British army, manned mainly by Dalits, and the state’s Peshwa rulers.

The Maharashtra government and the police have argued before courts the activists were arrested because evidence linked them with the banned CPI (Maoist) group, and not because of their dissenting views. The state’s lawyer has argued that keeping the activists under house arrest would hamper police investigation against them.

Bhardwaj is under police guard at her home in Delhi, Rao in Hyderabad, Navlakha in Delhi, Ferreira in Mumbai and Gonsalves in the same city.


courtesy:HT