Bhima Koregaon arrests: Maharashtra Police files affidavit in SC, says it has sufficient evidence to establish Maoist links

The Maharashtra police on Wednesday filed a counter affidavit in the Supreme Court regarding the arrest of activists in connection with the Bhima-Koregaon violence case, reports said. The five rights activists were not arrested for their dissenting views but due to the cogent evidence linking them with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), Maharashtra government claimed in the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The apex court while ordering the house arrest of the five activists on 29 August till tomorrow had categorically said that “dissent is the safety valve of democracy”. [caption id=“attachment_5119391” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Image of Maharashtra ADGP Param Bir Singh. ANI[/caption] The Maharashtra Police in its response accused the activists of planning to carry out violence, planned ambush against country and the security forces. The state police said there was sufficient evidence to ‘dispel’ the claim that they were arrested for their dissenting views. The counter affidavit questioned the locus (right to bring action in court) of the petitioners, Romila Thapar and economists Prabhat Patnaik and Devika Jain, sociologist Satish Deshpande and legal expert Maja Daruwala, and said they were “strangers” to the investigation in the matter. On 29 August, historian Romila Thapar and four activists had filed a petition in the Supreme Court against the arrests of the activists in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence. Responding to the petition, the Supreme Court had directed the Maharashtra Police to keep the five activists — Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj and Varavara Rao under house arrest — until the next hearing, which is scheduled on 6 September. A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra will hear the matter on Thursday. With inputs from PTI