The Pune police on Tuesday told a Maharashtra sessions court that the five arrested ‘Urban Maoists’ had planned an event at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in memory of dead Naxal leader Naveen Babu, Times of India has reported.
As per the district prosecutor – Ujjwala Pawar, the accused were operating under direct instructions from the CPI (Maoist), to “instigate, provoke and influence” the students to join the left-wing terrorist organisation. The prosecutor also claimed that the CPI (Maoist) was going to supply materials for the event.
The five suspected ‘Urban Maoists’ were arrested by the Pune police on 6 June, over charges of organising the Elgaar Parishad held at Pune’s Shaniwarwada on 31 December 2017, which is believed to have instigated the Bhima-Koregaon violence a day later.
Those five arrested have been identified as Delhi based activist Rona Wilson, advocate Surendra Gadling, professor Shoma Sen and Mahesh Raut from Nagpur and Mumbai’s Sudhir Dhavle. Incidentally out of these five, Rona is a known JNU alumnus who is accused of plotting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assassination.
All the accused except Gadling were produced before the sessions court on Tuesday. Gadling was admitted in a government hospital over medical grounds.
A PTI report incidentally takes things further to claim that the accused were supposedly going to plan a “lecture series” in the memory of a slain Naxal leader to incite students to join the banned organisation. The report also quoted the public prosecutor as claiming that the episode was a deep-rooted conspiracy acting as a national security threat, which needed to be investigated.
The prosecutor further told the court that documents seized from the accused established their involvement in anti-national activities. She claimed that a total of 25 terabytes of data was recovered from them, which required them to be placed in the judicial custody for a longer period of time.
As per a DNA report, the court extended the custody of the four accused till 21 June.
