Bhima-Koregaon activist files bail plea in Pune court

Pune: Sudha Bhardwaj, one of the five rights activists arrested in connection with the Bhima-Koregaon violence case, on Thursday filed a bail application via her lawyer Yug Choudhari in the Pune special court. The court is yet to give the date of hearing. Ms Bhardwaj is currently under house arrest at her home in Faridabad in Haryana.

She along with activists Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao were arrested by the Pune police on August 28 from various cities in connection with the riots took place on January 1 this year. Romila Thapar, a renowned historian, had filed petition in the Supreme Court the next day asking that a SIT to be constituted to probe the matter and see whether the evidence was genuine. SC recently dismissed the demand of SIT and said arrests were made not because of dissents but because of the activists’ alleged association with the banned Maoist Party. However, the court gave them a month to seek legal remedy and continued their house arrest till that time. Meanwhile, the Delhi high court approved Mr Navlakha’s bail application, prompting the Maharashtra government on Wednesday to move the Supreme Court challenging the high court order.

Mr Navlakha was under house arrest for five weeks before the Delhi high court allowed a petition to free him on Monday. The high court had not only directed that the activist be freed but had also quashed the trial court’s transit remand order that he had challenged.

According to the government’s petition, the Delhi high court had misread the ‘Criminal Procedure Code’ (CrPC) while allowing Mr Navlakha to be freed from house arrest.

The petition read, “The case in hand depicts misreading of section 167 (1) and (2) of the CrPC by the high court while passing the impugned ord-er.” Section 167 (1) states that in case an accused is to be produced before the jurisdictional magistrate, it is incumbent upon the police to produce the case diary.