In his 64-page bail application on merits of the case, scholar and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde, an accused in the Elgar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case, has said that he was implicated in the case to humiliate the entire dalit community.
“The applicant accused, despite hailing from a poor family, has due to his sheer brilliance and hard work over five decades of his career, reached the position he has in Indian society and is a world renowned Dalit scholar. However, the casteist forces in our society cannot digest this fact and has implicated him in the case in an attempt to belittle his own achievements and to humiliate the entire dalit community. The same humiliation was heaped on no less than Dr Ambedkar during his lifetime,” it said. The plea was filed on Tuesday through advocate R Sathyanarayan.
It stated that he is a critic of the CPI (Maoist) ideology and that linking him with the banned organization makes no sense.
It gave a sequence of events and said that he never attended the Elgar Parishad event. While the NIA mentions him as one of the convenors of the event, it has not shown any evidence of it, it stated.
The NIA has alleged that he used to meet his younger brother Milind Teltumbde, an underground and wanted ‘Maoist’ and share Maoist literature collected from international conferences. The application stated that he had not been in contact with Milind for the past 25 years.
Meanwhile, after a plea was filed recently by advocate Chandni Chawla for accused and activist Sudha Bharadwaj to be given access to books in jail, the special NIA court on Tuesday directed the Byculla jail authorities that Bharadwaj be allowed access to five books monthly from outside. The court, however, also directed the jail superintendent to carefully examine that they do not contain any objectionable material, including that propagating the banned Maoist organization CPI (Maoist).