Elgar Parishad case: Special NIA court in Mumbai rejects activist Stan Swamy's bail plea

Mumbai: A special NIA court in Mumbai on Monday rejected the bail plea filed by tribal rights activist Stan Swamy, arrested in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case. Additional sessions court judge Judge DE Kothalikar rejected bail pleas of 83-year-old Swamy on merits as well as on medical grounds. Swamy, a Jesuit priest and activist, was arrested from Ranchi in October, 2020, and has since been lodged at the Taloja Central Jail in Navi Mumbai. According to his lawyers, Swamy is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and he has lost the ability to hear from both his ears. He also suffers from several other ailments. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had opposed Swamy’s bail plea saying the probe had revealed that Swamy was a staunch supporter of organisations such as ‘Vistapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan’ and ‘People’s Union for Civil Liberties’, which were working as “fronts of the CPI (Maoist)”. Swamy’s lawyer Sharif Shaikh had argued that the NIA had failed to establish Swamy’s connection to the Elgar Parishad-Maoists links case.