Mumbai: The Bombay High Court while refusing to discharge alleged naxal Satyanarayan Rani has observed that witness statements and other evidence "cumulatively amounts to a grave suspicion of his association with the CPI (Maoist)". The court noted that evidence showed that Rani and others were members of a banned organisation CPI (M) and conspired to destabilise and overthrow the Government of India.
It added that evidence shows that Rani, along with other co-accused, was a part of larger conspiracy, which resulted into a terrorist act, and that he had attended a meeting where conspiracy was hatched to ambush the security forces and revenge the killing of 40 naxals.
Rani was arrested in connection with the 2019 Gadchiroli blast case that killed 15 police personnel and one civilian. The HC dismissed Rani’s plea on July 10, however, the detailed order copy was made available on Thursday.
Rani has approached the HC after his discharge plea was rejected by the special court in August 2021. While dismissing Rani’s appeal, the HC said it cannot find any infirmity with the special court order refusing to discharge
“The evidence (against Rani) justified framing of charge,” a bench of Justices Bharati Dangre and Manjusha Deshpande said. The police personnel were killed at the behest of senior cadre members, HC said
At the stage of discharge, the role of the judge is to sift through the evidence in order to find out whether there is sufficient ground to proceed against the accused. “At this stage, the probative value of the material cannot be gone into and the said material brought on record has to be accepted as true,” the bench said.
“There must exist some material for entertaining a strong suspicion, which can form the basis for drawing of the charge and refusal to discharge the accused,” it added.
The defence of the accused is not to be looked into at the time of deciding discharge plea, as the law says the records in the case are to be “perused”, which is documents or evidence, if any, produced by the prosecution, the court said.
The Code of Criminal Procedure does not give any right to the accused to produce any document at the stage of framing of the charge, and the submission of the accused is to be confined to the material produced by the police.
The court has allowed Rani’s another petition challenging special court’s order permitting the prosecution to submit statements of certain witnesses as additional evidence in the case after filing of its chargesheet and supplementary chargesheet
“The above procedure adopted is completely unknown to law,” the bench underlined and while quashing the sessions court’s order.
Rani was granted bail by HC in the case in July 2022.
On May 1, 2019, an IED blast targeted a vehicle carrying members of the Maharashtra police's Quick Response Team (QRT) killing 15 police personnel. Rani was arrested in June 2019 from Hyderabad and was accused of being an alleged Naxal operative and also for being part of the blast conspiracy. The case is being probed by the National Investigating Agency (NIA).
The NIA opposed the plea arguing that there was prima facie evidence to show his involvement in Naxal activities and also the blast.
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