Keep activists under house arrest, says Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed Maharashtra police to continue to keep the five activists, who were arrested recently for alleged links to the banned CPI (Maoist) outfit, under house arrest till September 17 when it will next hear the case.

This was after the Maharashtra government urged the court to vacate its earlier order directing that the five activists — lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj, journalist Gautam Naulakha, poet Varavara Rao, lecturer Vernon Gonsalves and lawyer and human rights activist Arun Ferriera — be placed under house arrest, saying they “destroy evidence” at “home” while “alerting other potential accused”.

The state claimed while it respected the right of dissidents to freely air their views, the activists had not been arrested because of their ideology. Rather, there was cogent evidence to show they were active members of CPI (Maoist), it claimed. They were not only involved in “planning and preparing for violence but were in the process of creating large-scale violence and destruction of property”.