The Bombay high court, while hearing posthumously the appeals filed by late Jesuit priest Stan Swamy in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case, on Monday said he was a wonderful person and the court had 'great respect' for his work.
Do Uddhav Thackeray, Aditya Thackeray, Sanjay Raut, and Sharad Pawar want the deaths of the Bhima Koregaon accused to be associated with their regime? asks Jyoti Punwani.
He took up the causes of tribals marginalised after their lands has been taken over for dams, mines and townships, often without their consent.
The raids were carried out as part of a probe into the violence between Dalits and the upper caste Peshwas at Koregaon-Bhima village near Pune after an event called Elgar Parishad, or conclave, on December 31 last year.
None of them had anything to do with the violence at Bhima Koregaon, where they were not even present, points out Aakar Patel.
'The BJP's modus operandi is not just to be intolerant of dissent, it is to create mistrust and doubt between communities and the electoral process itself.'
'These charges of the prosecution will fall to the ground and I am 100 per cent sure of that.'
A cache of weapons was recovered from the encounter site
The court was hearing the plea filed against the arrest of the rights activists -- Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha -- in the case.
Minal Gadling, in her petition, claimed that all the arrested five, including her husband, have been in a false and mala fide way implicated in the case even when there was no involvement on their part in any such activity.
The larger conspiracy of Communist Party of India-Maoists was to overthrow the democratic system in the country, and the accused were working in that direction, the chargesheet claimed.
District and Sessions Judge K D Vadane sent the two activists to police custody after district government pleader and public prosecutor Ujjwala Pawar argued in the court that since all the accused were under house arrest as per the Supreme Court's directions, they could not be interrogated in connection with the case.
The prosecution, while opposing the bail applications, had argued that they have "corrborative evidence" against the accused to prove their involvement in Maoist activities, such as mobilising cadres, recruiting students from eminent institutes and sending them to the interior to become "professional revolutionaries", raise funds and procure weapons.
On the last date of hearing, the Maharashtra police had produced additional letters to establish Moist links of the arrested accused even as the petitioners described it as cooked-up evidence.
Saturday will be the last time the Mumbai Mirror will hit newsstands as a daily. Two Saturdays ago, its owners, the Times of India group, shocked the city by deciding to convert the Mirror into a weekly newspaper. Jyoti Punwani salutes the Mirror and its editor, Meenal Baghel, for its pathbreaking journalism.
Teltumbde later termed the police's case against him and several other social activists as 'harassment' and a ploy to 'humiliate' them.
Stirring up a fresh controversy for the Trinamool Congress, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's nephew Abhishek claimed that the state government should be credited for 'murdering' dreaded Maoist leader, Kishenji.
Fadnavis said the decision of the top court proved that there was no conspiracy behind action by the state police against Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha.
Talking to reporters in Kolhapur, Pawar said it was not right on the part of the Centre to hand over the probe into the case, which was with the Pune police, to the NIA as law and order was a state subject. NCP leader and Home Minister Anil Deshmukh said Uddhav Thackeray had overruled him on the probe in the case.
On January 1 in 2018, violence erupted at an event to mark 100 years of the Bhima-Koregaon battle, leaving one dead and several injured, including 10 policemen.
The Bharatiya Janata Party's carping ally said the police assertion about security threat to Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Maoists was just a 'conspiracy theory'.
'Anybody and everybody who opposes this government for whatever reasons will be branded a terrorist and charged in such a manner that all human rights will be taken away.'
The Delhi high court freed Navlakha from house arrest on Monday, five weeks after he and four other rights activists were arrested in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence in Maharashtra.
The top court directed the Maharashtra government to place before it the material which was collected during the investigation against Navlakha and placed before the high court in a sealed cover.
An SIT officer probing the murder case said the investigation is in final stage and a chargesheet will be filed in two months.
'By transferring the case to the NIA without the Maharashtra government's consent clearly indicates they want to play mischief.'
The Delhi high said that the trial court order was unsustainable in law.
"Every criminal investigation is based on allegations and we have to see whether there is some material," the court said.
'Ludicrous they might be, but they are not without threats -- much like letters that appear suddenly in homes of those opposing the government.' 'One must exercise some caution before believing in them,' says Uttaran Das Gupta.
The apex court questioning the police about the arrests said that 'dissent is the safety valve of democracy and if you don't allow these safety valves, it will burst.'
Pune police on Tuesday raided homes of prominent Left-wing activists in several states and arrested at least five of them -- poet Varavara Rao in Hyderabad, activists Vernon Gonzalves and Arun Ferreira in Mumbai, trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj in Faridabad and Chhattisgarh and civil liberties activist Gautam Navalakha in Delhi.
'My only interest is that the law is upheld for each and every citizen.' 'Whenever this case is decided, it will be protection for you and every Indian.' 'I just want the rule of law of to be followed.'
N Sathiya Moorthy goes back in time to dig up three cases that may not have any citation in legal text-books or lawyers' ready-reckoners quoted before courts but which may still have a bearing on the current case against the arrested activists.
'To ascribe motives to the actions of the state government at such an early stage of police investigation will be counter-productive,' says former Union home secretary Madhav Godbole.
'This is how Narendra Modi-Amit Shah rule. They are now announcing that these arrested Naxalites want to kill Modi.'
'They have realised that class war is not possible in India, so they are trying to bring about a caste war.'
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