Don't take Gautam Navlakha out of Delhi, says high court

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday directed Maharashtra Police not to take Maoist sympathizer Gautam Navlakha -- who has been arrested on terror charges -- out of Delhi till Wednesday and keep him under house arrest till further orders.

Gautam Navlakha was arrested by a joint team of Delhi Police and a Maharashtra Police team from Pune and were presented before a magistrate's court in Saket Courts Complex, which has allowed the police to take him away and present him before a local court in Pune.

However, Navlakha's counsel filed a habeas corpus seeking his whereabouts in the high court in the afternoon. The bench listed the matter for hearing in the evening and sought a response from the Delhi Police.

The police told the court that they had already got transit remand of the accused from a magistrate court here.

A bench headed by Justice S. Muralidhar, however, directed the police not to take Navlakha out of Delhi and keep him under arrest in his house here till its further orders and listed the matter for further hearing on Wednesday.

For a second time in five months, the Pune police on Tuesday raided alleged Maoist sympathizers across the country and detained several activists.

The raids were carried out in Maharashtra, Goa, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Haryana since morning. Scores of supporters of these activists staged noisy protests during the police raids at various locations.

The raids were described as a follow-up to a similar action on April 17 when the Pune police had swooped on over half-a-dozen Dalit activists and those involved with the Kabir Kala Manch, which organised an Elgar Conference in Pune on December 31, 2017.

The next day, on January 1, caste riots erupted in Koregaon-Bhima which left one person dead, culminating in a Maharashtra shutdown on January 3 called by the Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh, headed by Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of B.R. Ambedkar.

As per available information, the activists raided are Varavara Rao and Kranti (Telangana), Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Pereira (Mumbai), Sudha Bharadwaj and Stan Swami (Chhattisgarh), Gautam Navlakha (Delhi) and Anand Teltumbde (Goa).

--IANS

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