New Delhi (TIP)- Nearly five years after their arrest under the UAPA for alleged Maoist links in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon violence case, activists Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira have been granted bail by the Supreme Court.  The “materials available against them at this stage cannot justify continued detention”, the court observed.
The two were booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and jailed in August 2018.
The top court bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Sudhanshu Dhulia on Friday said that the five-year-long incarceration of the activists makes them eligible for bail despite the charges being “grave”.
The court noted that Gonsalves was earlier convicted of offences, including under the UAPA, and had cases pending against him, and imposed a series of conditions for the bail. It stated that the two activists must not leave Maharashtra without the trial court’s permission and should surrender their passports with the NIA, among other conditions.
Over the years, the police and the central agencies arrested a hoard of activists and academicians in the Bhima Koregaon case, including Stan Swamy, Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Vavlakha, Varavara Rao and Sudha Bharadwaj. Newslaundry has reported extensively on how in most of these arrests, rights and rules were violated.
This report delved into the weak case against writer Anand Teltumbde, while this detailed the apathy of the authorities towards activist Stan Swamy, who died in prison after being denied medical care. In this interview, human rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj had spoken about her journey and what shaped her ideology.
The top court asked Gonsalves and Ferreira to not leave Maharashtra, surrender their passports, use only one mobile phone and keep it charged through the day, share location and pair their devices with the investigating officer, give their addresses to NIA, and be present in the local police station once a week. Violation of any of these conditions, or those imposed by a special NIA court, would entitle the federal agency to seek cancellation of bail, the court said.
“There is nothing against the appellants to prima facie establish that they had indulged in the activities which would constitute overawing any public functionary by means of criminal force or the show of criminal force or attempts by the appellants to do so. Neither were they found to have caused death of any public functionary,” the order added.
Gonsalves and Ferreira were among 16 activists, lawyers and researchers who were arrested in 2018 in connection with the violence that broke out during the bicentennial commemoration of a British-era war in Maharashtra’s Bhima Koregaon village. One person died during the violence that also sparked sweeping protests by Dalit groups who gather in the hundreds of thousands at the war memorial every year. The Pune police, and then NIA, have argued that an event in Pune on December 31, 2017 – called the Elgar Parishad, where allegedly inflammatory speeches were made – stoked the violence.