Elgar Parishad: Bombay HC grants Gautam Navalakha bail

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court granted human rights activist and journalist Gautam Navlakha bail in the Elgaar Parishad case on Tuesday. The court ordered the same on his appeal against a special court order denying him bail, The Indian Express reported.

However, the high court bench of Justices Ajey S Gadkari and Shivkumar G Dige stayed their own order for three weeks for NIA (National Investigation Agency) to appeal against it. The agency had sought a six-week stay on the order, but the court only allowed three.

The seventh of the 16 accused who have got bail from the high court or the Supreme Court in the case, Navalakha was arrested on April 14, 2020 and he has been jailed since. He was moved house arrest after a Supreme Court order in November 2022.

The bail conditions imposed on him will be similar to his co-accused Anand Teltumbde, an academic and writer, and Mahesh Raut.

The bench had finished hearing on the matter on November 7 and had made its verdict on Tuesday.

After a special rejected his bail plea, Navalakha first appealed in the High Court in September 2022. In March 2023, the high court directed the special court to conduct a fresh hearing, stating that the September order by the lower court was cryptic. The HC said that the special court did not consider an analysis of evidence relied on by the prosecution. The HC asked the special judge to restore Navalakha’s bail plea and make a verdict within four weeks.

Again, on April 6, 2023, the special court again rejected the bail order observing that there was prima facie evidence against Navalakha. He was allegedly having nexus with a convict named Syed Gulam Nabi Fai, who was convicted by a US court in 2012 for having links with Pakistan spy agency ISI. The special court also observed that there were reasonable grounds that Navalakha was a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

When Navalakha approached Bombay HC in April, Justice Revati Mohite-Dere, a senior judge presiding over a division bench, recused herself from hearing the plea. It was after that Justice Gadkari-led bench heard his plea.

In January 2018, their violence broke out in a march commemorating the 200-year battle of Bhima Koregaon. Then, an event was held titled Elgaar Parishad, and some allegedly incited the mention of violence in that event. Pune Police arrested nine people, and NIA arrested seven others after the latter took the case into its hands in 2020.

In July 2021, one of the accused, Father Stan Swamy, passed away in judicial custody. In September 2023, the high court granted bail to Mahesh Raut but stayed the order for NIA to challenge in the Supreme Court. Even after two months, Raut has not been released after the top court kept extending the stay on his bail.

The Supreme Court, however handed bail to co-accused Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira, justifying that they were in jail for almost five years. Teltumbde was granted bail by HC and was upheld by the SC.

Telugu poet and activist Varavara Rao and lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj got bail in February and December 2021, respectively. Eight others, namely Sudhir Dhawle, Rona Wilson, Hany Babu, Surendra Gadling, Shoma Sen, Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe and Jyoti Jagtap, are still in jail, The Indian Express reported.