Pune Police have been conducting multiple raids across the country as part of its investigations into the alleged Maoist involvement in organising an event titled Elgaar Parishad in the city on December 31 last year.
Multiple raids conducted on Tuesday morning led to the arrests of several Dalit and human rights activists from various parts of the country including Jharkhand, Telangana, Delhi, Haryana and Goa. The police have arrested activists Vernon Gonsalves from Mumbai and Gautam Navlakha from Delhi. Lawyer and activist Sudha Bharadwaj was arrested in Haryana and poet Varavara Rao was arrested in Hyderabad.
According to The Indian Express, the police claim that various activists had made speeches at the event which was just a day ahead of the bicentennial celebration of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. These speeches, police say, had led to the violence that Pune witnessed the next day.
The event was organised to commemorate the completion of 200 years of the battle of Bhima Koregaon in which a British army comprising of a large number of Dalit soldiers had defeated the Peshwas. Thousands of Dalits assemble in Pune every year on January 1 and march to the village of Koregaon Bhima in the memory of those who were killed in the battle.
According to police, the names of these activists had emerged in the interrogations of five activists and lawyers who were arrested by the police earlier in June.
These five included Mumbai-based Republican Panthers Jati Antachi Chalwal leader Sudhir Dhawale, Rona Wilson, a Delhi-based activist of Committee of Release of Political Prisoners, Surendra Gadling, a Nagpur-based lawyer, Nagpur University professor Shoma Sen and Mahesh Raut, who had been a Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellow.
When they were produced in the court, Pune Police had said that documents recovered from them had revealed plans to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the same way Rajiv Gandhi was killed. All of them are currently lodged in Pune's Yervada jail under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
The raids and arrests made by the police on Tuesday morning have invited flak from all sections of the society. While the Congress has called the raids a threat to democracy, a few journalists and activists have also taken to Twitter to express their concern over the arrests.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan called the arrested bunch of activists as some of the finest Human rights activists and dissenting voices. "Getting news that Pune police have raided/arrested among the finest Human rights activists&dissenting voices, such as Sudha Bharadwaj (a human rights lawyer), Gautam Navlakha (Former Pres of PUDR), Fr Stan Swamy (a human rights activist) & Ors. Fascist fangs are now openly bared," Bhushan tweeted.
Former TV journalist and AAP member Ashutosh said that the arrests will further intensify the Dalit movement. Scroll.in's executive editor Supriya Sharma tweeted that it was unbelievable that Sudha Bharadwaj has been booked under the anti-terror law. AIPWA Secretary Kavita Krishnan called it an undeclared emergency.
