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Elgar Parishad case: Court rejects bail pleas of six accused
Judge closed all open applications by the accused and said that the accused are free to go to trial if they so choose
A special court in Pune on Wednesday rejected the bail pleas of six accused in the Elgar Parishad case. Additional Sessions Judge SR Navandar passed the order.
While reading the order, Judge Navandar said, “As per a recent Supreme Court order, I have to consider the material in its entirety. Admissibility cannot be taken into consideration at this stage. In light of the SC order, I have to go through the material as it is. As per that, they are active members of a banned organisation and they are doing everything to achieve the objective of the organisation.”
The judge was referring to an SC order in the case against Kashmir-based businessman Zahoor Watali filed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA).
The judge closed all open applications by the accused and said that the accused are free to go to trial if they so choose.
Ujjwala Pawar, district government pleader (DGP) and public prosecutor in the case, read the bail denial order and said, “The court has passed an excellent verdict on the judicial and legal point of view. The court has considered that the accused are not passive, but active members of CPI (Maoist).”
She had presented a voluminous collection of letters allegedly seized from the nine accused in the case, including Shoma Sen, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut, Rona Wilson, Sudhir Dhawale, Vara Vara Rao, Veron Gonsalves, Arun Ferriera and Sudha Bharadwaj. Of them, only six had argued in front of Judge Navandar.
The three others, Gonsalves, Ferriera and Bhardwaj, had approached the Bombay High Court for bail. However, their application was rejected on October 15, a few days after Judge Navandar took over the Pune special court.
“The court considered one letter regarding ₹5 lakh given to Mahesh Raut to revive the dying unrest caused by Bhima Koregaon agitation. The second letter taken into consideration is the one that mentions the end of Modi Raj. The third letter, related to arms and ammunitions, recovered from Rona Wilson’s laptop. Pahad Singh’s confessional statement which the court says that the witness attributes the roles of every accused person. The letters by Surendra Gadling to comrade Prakash, which maps the impacts of the terrorist attacks and informs CPI(M) members about areas with less security presence, were also taken into consideration,” said Pawar.
While the defence lawyers had questioned the veracity of the evidence presented in the case, Pawar had provided call records of the accused to the court. The first chargesheet in the case named 10 people while the supplementary chargesheet named five others.
Besides the nine activists and lawyers who are currently in Yerawada central jail, four others named in the chargesheets are Dipak alias Milind Teltumbade, Prashant Bose, Rituparn Goswami and absconding CPI(M) leader Ganapathy alias Chandrashekhar.
The activists and lawyers were booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
