PANAJI
More than 50 top global figures including Nobel laureates and European Union parliamentarians have sought the "immediate release" of 16 academicians and eminent activists incarcerated for long under the draconian UAPA in the Bhima Koregaon violence case of 2018.
Among the signatories to the letter written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Chief Justice of India, the chief minister of Maharashtra and other Indian authorities are academics, European Union MPs, two Nobel laureates and other figures of international prominence.
The letter demands the immediate release of the "political prisoners" arrested in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence case.
Multi-media news outlet The Wire quotes the letter as saying that the temporary administrative order to release prisoners to decongest jails in the wake of the Covid outbreak be applied to these "political prisoners" as well.
Among signatories to the letter are noted linguist Noam Chomsky, former President of the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention José Antonio Guevara-Bermúdez, Nobel laureates Olga Tokarczuk and Wole Soyinka and former editor-in-chief of The Guardian UK Alan Rusbridger, besides journalist Naomi Klein among several others.
“In a moment of unprecedented national calamity, we ask for decisive action by the government and court to set the BK-16 at liberty to avert further tragedy,” The Wire quoted the letter as saying.
“Two of the BK-16 were recently shifted to multi-specialty hospitals after intense advocacy from family members and concerned citizens,” the letters states and also refers to poet Varavara Rao, who got temporary bail on medical grounds after being admitted to a hospital for weeks, according to The Wire.
Among those arrested in the case is Goa-based academic and Goa Institute of Management (GIM) faculty Dr Anand Teltumbde.
Teltumbde was put in a Mumbai jail after he surrendered on April 14, 2020, and has denied any involvement in the violence at Bhima Koregaon in 2018.
Shoma Sen, who headed the English literature department at Nagpur University, lawyers Arun Ferreira and Sudha Bharadwaj, activists Vernon Gonsalves and Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, a UAPA expert and lawyer from Nagpur, Father Stan Swamy, Delhi University professor Hany Babu and civil liberties activist Gautam Navlakha are the others in jail in the case for between one and three years.
