Police’s evidence fabricated, bid to defame us: Bharadwaj
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI/HYDERABAD : Lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj and families of other activists arrested in the recent raids have dismissed the “evidence” produced by the Maharashtra police to link them with the Maoists as “fabricated”.
Bharadwaj, one of the five activists arrested by Maharashtra police, said a purported letter implicating her was “totally concocted” to criminalise her and human rights organisations.
The police had claimed Friday that Bharadwaj wrote to one “Com Prakash”. Reacting to this in a handwritten statement, Bharadwaj said the “fabricated letter” was not brought before the Pune court or the Faridabad chief judicial magistrate while seeking to “whisk” her to Pune.
In a media briefing in Mumbai, the police had released details of the “letters” it claims contains alleged link of the arrested activists with the violence in Koregaon-bhima in January.
On Tuesday, police arrested Varavara Rao in Hyderabad, Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira in Mumbai, Bharadwaj in Faridabad, and Gautam Navalakha in New Delhi.
The family of Vernon Gonsalves also said the charges were “fabricated”. “I was present when searches and raids were conducted at our home and I know what the police have seized,” his son Sagar said Saturday. “I could not stop laughing when the police were levelling false charges with the so called letters,” he said, referring to the police’s press conference.
The activist’s lawyer wife Susan Abraham called the arrests a ploy to divert attention from the real culprits behind the Koregaon-bhima violence.
“The letters read out by the police during the media briefing are manufactured. None of these letters were filed or submitted to the court,” she said.
“The police have not followed the procedure established by the cyber laws for the seizure of electronic data,” she added.
In Hyderabad, Telugu poet Varavara Rao’s nephew Venugopal said the evidence presented by Maharashtra police to link the arrested activists to Maoists was “cooked up”. “All this was said in June. It is nothing new,” he told PTI Saturday, and termed the police press conference contempt of court. The Supreme Court had asked the evidence to be submitted on September 6, and ordered for the five activists to be kept under house arrest until then.
Also on Saturday, human rights activist Anand Teltumbde refuted police’s claim that he attended a convention in Paris allegedly funded by Maoists. “I keep going abroad for academic conferences. It is all on official invitations and everything is well documented,” he told PTI.