A day after the pan India crackdown on activists, the action shifted to the courts today with the Supreme Court giving urgent hearing to a plea against the arrests in the afternoon and three of the five who were nabbed to be produced before a Pune court.
Telugu poet Varavara Rao and activists Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira were taken to Pune late last night and are likely to be produced in a court later in the day, a senior police official in Pune said.
The other two arrested for their suspected links with Maoists were trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj in Faridabad and civil liberties activist Gautam Navlakha in Delhi. The five activists - Varavara Rao, lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj, and activists Arun Fereira, Gautam Navlakha and Vernon Gonsalves - were arrested in a multi-city raid by Pune police on Tuesday.
The police said the arrests were linked to last year's Bhima Koregaon violence, in which Dalit activists had clashed with upper-caste Marathas.
In June, five people -- Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut, Rona Wilson and Shoma Sen -- were arrested for allegedly making "provocative" speeches at an event in at Bhima Koregaon village in January, which, the police said, triggered violence. Yesterday's raids were carried out on basis of what they said during interrogation, the police said.
