HC questions court order on Navlakha's transit remand

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday questioned a lower court order to allow Maharashtra Police to take rights activist-journalist Gautam Navlakha to Pune, given the fact that all documents, except a remand application, were in the Marathi language.

A bench of Justices S. Muralidhar and Vinod Goel took strong exception to the fact that the magistrate concerned understood the charges levelled against Navlakha, who was arrested on Tuesday, when all documents presented in the lower court were in Marathi and it had not even bothered to check the case diary.

The High Court was of the opinion that the lower court should be cautious while granting transit remand.

When informed by Maharashtra Police's counsel and Additional Solicitor General Aman Lekhi that the Supreme Court had stayed the transit remand and ordered house arrest of Navlakha and four other arrested rights activists till September 6, the High Court listed the matter for Thursday.

The bench said that it will hear the matter after going through the top court's order.

Lekhi had contended in the High Court that the accused were connected to a conspiracy and there was sufficient evidence against them.

Navlakha was arrested from his residence in south Delhi's Nehru Enclave by Pune police on Tuesday and presented before the magistrate who allowed for presenting him before a court in Pune.

The High Court had on Tuesday directed the Maharashtra Police not to take Navlakha out of Delhi till Wednesday and to keep him under house arrest till further orders.

The court was hearing a habeas corpus on Navlakha's whereabouts filed by his counsel Nitya Ramakrishnan and Warisha Farasat.

For the second time in five months, the Pune police on Tuesday raided alleged Maoist sympathisers across the country and arrested five of them.

The raids were carried out in Maharashtra, Goa, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Delhi and Haryana in connection with the Elgar Conference in Pune on December 31, 2017, and caste riots in Koregaon-Bhima the next day.

--IANS

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