SC denies anticipatory bails to Teltumbde & Navlakha

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the anticipatory bail pleas of rights activists Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha, both booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for alleged links with banned CPI(ML) and the Koregaon Bhima violence, and asked them to surrender before the National Investigation Agency within three weeks.
A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and M R Shah told senior advocates Kapil Sibal and A M Singhvi, appearing for Teltumbde and Navlakha, that the trial court, the Bombay High Court and the apex court had taken concurrent views about existence of prima facie material to reject their pleas for quashing of FIR.“How can we take a different view now and grant bail observing that there is no prima facie case against them,” it said while giving them three weeks to surrender.
When solicitor general Tushar Mehta, appearing for the NIA, opposed grant of three weeks, the bench said they had been under protection from arrest since August 28, 2018, and it would do no harm if they were given some time to surrender. However, it asked them to surrender their passports immediately.
Sibal said there was absolutely no evidence to link Teltumbde directly or indirectly to the banned Maoist organisation and to the Koregaon Bhima violence and cited the exemplary academic track record of the IIM-A graduate in the field of management and information technology. However, the bench asked, “Who has given this certificate? Is it necessary for the court to go into his personal credentials while deciding a petition for anticipatory bail?” Sibal said it was necessary, as a person of Teltumbde’s standing should not be framed under UAPA without a “shred of evidence”.
Singhvi and Sibal said though the incident for which they were facing UAPA charges was nearly two-and-a-half-years old, the NIA had never called them for questioning. “We are ready to cooperate in the investigation and will appear before the NIA for questioning as and when summoned,” they said. But the SG narrated the sequence of events leading to violence at Koregaon Bhima and showed the details of investigation carried out by the NIA. After this, the SC said it was not inclined to grant anticipatory bail to the duo.
Immediately after the court passed the order, Navlakha wrote an open letter thanking Justices Mishra and Shah for giving him three weeks to surrender and also thanked Sibal and Singhvi for arguing his case. He said, “Now that I have to surrender within three weeks, I ask myself - dare I hope to be freed from the burden of being accused in what appears to me to be yet another conspiracy trial, one more in the long list of such trials? Will the co-accused and others like them get their freedom back? These questions creep in because of the times we live in where civil liberties are getting progressively squeezed, and where only one narrative dominates, backed by crassness in public life.”