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Day after questioning it, judge says aware War and Peace is literary classic
The observation by Bombay High Court came a day after media reports said he asked accused Vernon Gonsalves to explain why he kept “objectionable material” like a copy of “War and Peace” at his home.
Bombay high court judge Sarang Kotwal on Thursday clarified that he did not mean to suggest that all the books seized from activist Vernon Gonsalves’s house were incriminating.
The clarification came a day after Kotwal sought Gonsalves’s explanation after the Pune police cited “highly incriminating evidence” in form of “books and CDs with objectionable titles” recovered from his possession to oppose his bail plea.
Kotwal said he knows that Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a literary classic and that he was reading a list of books and CDs cited in the charge sheet in the case. “It was written in such poor handwriting… I was making a query [on why Gonsalves had copies of these books] but did not want to suggest that everything was incriminating,” he said.
Kotwal said there were so many references to war and other titles. “Before I went to War and Peace, I made a reference to Rajya Daman [another book] too. Can a judge not ask any questions in court?”
The lawyer of a co-accused said the book the court referred to was a collection of essays edited by Biswajit Roy, titled War and Peace in Junglemahal: People, State and Maoists.
The court is hearing bail pleas of Gonsalves and five others, who were arrested last year for allegedly making provocation speeches on December 31, 2017.
The speeches have been blamed for allegedly triggering caste violence that left one person dead when Dalits gathered near Pune the next day to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the victory of Mahar scheduled caste soldiers of the British East India Company over Brahmin Peshwas at Bhima-Koregaon.
Gonsalves told the court that he owned 2,000 books and none of them, including the ones seized from his home were banned.
His lawyer, Mihir Desai, informed the court that police were in possession of these books for a year now but had done nothing about them. “These books that the police call incriminating are not banned under section 95 of the Criminal Procedure Code. In fact, they are all available on Amazon. It is possible that the government did not know about these books until they seized them from me [Gonsalves],” Desai said.
