Elgaar Parishad case: HC grants bail to Gautam Navlakha, stays order for 3 weeks for NIA to move SC

Navlakha has been incarcerated since his arrest on April 14, 2020, and was placed under house arrest in Navi Mumbai following a Supreme Court order in November last year.

The bail conditions for Navlakha will be similar to those for his co-accused Anand Teltumbde, an academic and writer, and Mahesh Raut. He is the seventh of the 16 accused who have got bail from the high court or the Supreme Court in the case.

The bench concluded the hearing on November 7 and pronounced its verdict on Tuesday.

Navlakha first filed an appeal before the high court after his bail plea was rejected by a special court in September 2022. In March this year, a bench led by Justice Gadkari directed the special court to conduct a fresh hearing, observing that its September order was “cryptic” and did not consider an analysis of evidence relied on by the prosecution.

The high court set aside the September 5, 2022, order and asked the special judge to restore Navlakha’s bail application and take a decision within four weeks.

On April 6, 2023, special court judge Rajesh Katariya passed a reasoned order, rejecting the bail plea and said there was prima facie evidence of a nexus between Navlakha and Syed Gulam Nabi Fai, convicted by a US court in 2012 for links with the Pakistani spy agency ISI.

The special court also said there were reasonable grounds for believing accusations against Navlakha, including that he is a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).

Navlakha approached the high court again, on April 18. On April 20, Justice Revati Mohite-Dere, a senior judge presiding over a division bench, recused herself from hearing the plea, after which it was heard by the Justice Gadkari-led bench.

Nine accused were arrested in the Elgaar Parishad case by the Pune police in 2018, and seven others were arrested by the NIA after it took over the investigation in 2020. The accused are alleged to have, at an event titled Elgaar Parishad, incited violence that took place during a march undertaken in January 2018 on the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima Koregaon.

Among the accused, Father Stan Swamy passed away while in judicial custody in July 2021. In September this year, the high court granted bail to Mahesh Raut but stayed its order for the NIA to challenge it before the Supreme Court. He has not yet been released as the apex court has continued the stay on his bail from time to time.

In July this year, the Supreme Court granted bail to co-accused Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira, noting that they had been in jail as undertrials for almost five years. In November 2022 the high court granted bail to Teltumbde and the Supreme Court upheld the order in the same month.

The Supreme Court granted bail to Telugu poet and activist Varavara Rao, another accused, on medical grounds in August last year, confirming temporary bail granted to him by the high court in February 2021. Another accused, lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj, got default bail from the high court in December 2021.

The other eight accused—Sudhir Dhawle, Rona Wilson, Hany Babu, Surendra Gadling, Shoma Sen, Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe and Jyoti Jagtap—remain in jail and are yet to get bail.