‘Disagree with the term Urban Naxalite’
The former union Home minister P Chidambaram on Saturday asserted that there no such thing as “urban Naxalism” and condemned the recent arrests of five activists for involvement in January’s Bheema-Koregaon related violence in Maharashtra.
The senior Congress leader, who was here on Saturday, said that he did not agree with that term (Urban Naxalite) and would answer the question only when it was replaced. The Pune police arrested several activists, including P Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves for their suspected Maoist links on Tuesday. “They are Left wing intellectuals. They are working with tribals and the downtrodden. They are being intimidated by the present government because they are perceived as strong opponents of the Right wing. The Apex Court has come down heavily on the arrests and disallowed police custody. In the three days since they were arrested, not a shred of evidence has been put forth by the Maharashtra police,” he said. He further alleged that “These are strong arm tactics to muzzle freedom of expression and kill any ideological opposition. The arrests were made also to instil fear in those speaking against the BJP government.”
He hailed the apex court order that said civil rights activism was safety valve of democracy. All arrested persons are Left-wing intellectuals, poet and human right activists, he added.
When reminded that some of the same people, were earlier arrested by the then UPA governments too, Chidambaram replied that he was not aware of what charges the then Maharashtra government had made the arrests. “I was not home minister then,” he pointed out but said “if they were arrested for their Leftist views and activities only” it was wrong then, and it is wrong now too.” The UPA government had in 2013 termed these people as urban Maoists and called them a threat for the country and said that they were “in many ways more dangerous than cadres of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) of the CPI (Maoist).
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