In the Bhima Koregaon case, the National Investigation Agency has approached the Supreme Court against the Bombay High Court order granting bail to Professor Anand Teltumbde.
In the present case, Tushar Mehta, the Solicitor General of India mentioned the matter before Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud for urgent listing on Thursday. The bench while granting bail on November 18, the order was suspended for 1 week by the High Court.
The court while agreeing to list the matter on Friday, the CJI asked the Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta to serve copy of the petition to Advocate Aparna Bhat, who is appearing for Teltumbde on caveat.
On April 14, 2020, the 73-year-old former IIT professor and Dalit scholar was arrested by the NIA. Thus, after he surrendered before the agency following Supreme Court orders in connection with the alleged Maoist connections in the Bhima Koregaon case.
The High Court division bench comprising of Justice AS Gadkari and Justice Milind Jadhav while granting of the bail observed and made a prima facie observation that there was no evidence for the offence of terrorist activity which is against Teltumbde.
Further, it has been noted by the court that he had travelled extensively for giving lectures at prestigious institutes like the London School of Economics, Harvard University, MIT, Michigan University and merely because his brother was a wanted CPI(Maoist) accused doesn’t implicated him in his alleged links to the banned organisation.
However, it has been seen that the Appellant is a man of intellectual prominence in the field of Dalit ideology / movement and merely because he being the elder brother of wanted accused Milind Teltumbde who had gone underground 30 years ago to espouse the cause of CPI(M) which cannot be a sole ground to indict the Appellant and link him to the activities of CPI(M).
