The Bombay High Court has granted default bail to lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj, an accused in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist ties case, but denied bail to eight other co-accused, including Varavara Rao, Sudhir Dhawale, and Vernon Gonsalves.
A bench of Justices S. S. Shinde and N. J. Jamadar ordered that Bharadwaj, who is now detained in the Byculla women's prison, be brought before the Mumbai special NIA court on December 8, when the special court will rule on her bail conditions and release date.
Among the 16 activists and academics arrested in the case, Bharadwaj is the first to be granted default bail. Varavara Rao, a poet and activist, is now on medical bail. Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest, died on July 5 this year in a private hospital in the city while awaiting medical bail. Others are still being held as suspects while awaiting their trials.
Sudha Bharadwaj was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1961 to academic parents who were in the United States for post-doctoral research. She grew up in an intellectually and politically aware environment, and was witness to the vibrant student political movements at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India's premier university, where she spent her early years with her mother, noted economist Krishna Bhardwaj, who returned to India and taught for several years.
Her passion for mathematics led her to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, where she studied from 1979 to 1984. During her college years, Bharadwaj used to be quite active in politics as she experienced isolation as a woman on a primarily male-dominated campus.
She also enrolled in the National Service Scheme (an Indian government programme for young people) and expressed an interest in teaching. Her frequent excursions to the Indian countryside as part of the NSS exposed her to the harsh realities of caste and rural India.
Bharadwaj also formed strong relations with mess employees in the college, which gave her her first exposure to concerns of contract labourers. Bharadwaj's graduation year of 1984 was a watershed moment in India's history.
In a 2009 interview with Chitrangda Choudhary, she discussed "life-altering events" such as the anti-Sikh riots, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, and her volunteer work with Asiad Games construction workers in Delhi - Adivasi migrants from central India and Orissa working in conditions that she described as "bondage-like." Just two years later, in 1986, Bharadwaj moved to Chhattisgarh to work with mineworkers and teach their children at the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha.
A union member and artist, Kaladas Dahariya, described how the youthful Bharadwaj always seemed to be one of them. "Some people put up a show of being progressive, but she wasn't," Dahariya added. "She understood what the workers were going through. "Money and luxuries meant little to her," Chitrangda Choudhary wrote in Article 14.
People who have had the opportunity of meeting Bhardwaj have numerous stories to tell about her personality. One such tale goes that whenever Bharadwaj visited her colleagues in Delhi, she usually travelled by train, unreserved and the cheapest means of transportation.
Sudha Bharadwaj is popularly known as 'people's lawyer' in India. She has spent more than three decades working with the most marginalised sections of this country, especially in Chhattisgarh, a mineral-rich but conflict-ridden state in central India.
Sudha's work in the union and subsequent engagement with the CBI inquiry into Niyogi's death in 1991 led to her becoming a lawyer after she completed her law degree in 2000.
Bharadwaj began her legal work by defending workers' rights away from the spotlight. Furthermore, the state of Chhattisgarh's expanding resource conflicts over land, forests, and mining, as well as the state's spiralling military confrontation with Maoist insurgents, drew her into a broader range of legal work and human-rights activity.
Her fight has always been to defend worker rights to a living wage and decent working conditions, as well as indigenous people's constitutional rights to their land, and to expose the unconstitutional state-sponsored armed militia's atrocities (rape and sexual assault against women, murders, and pillage of entire villages) committed against people resisting forced displacement.
It was while working with trade unions and juggling court proceedings, when Bharadwaj realised that, given the situations of land acquisition, not only workers but farmers too needed legal assistance. This realisation prompted her to form the Janhit (People's Good) organisation to fight for community forest rights, Adivasi rights, environmental cases, and so on.
Bharadwaj has been involved in the Chhattisgarh trade union movement for over 25 years. She is the general secretary of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) in Chhattisgarh, as well as a member of Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression (WSS) and a founding member of the Indian Association of People's Lawyers (which is affiliated with the International Association of People's Lawyers).
Bharadwaj, however, had recently relocated to Delhi and was working as a visiting professor at the National Law University in Delhi (one of India's top law universities), where she taught a seminar course on tribal rights and land acquisition as well as a regular course on law and poverty. Her mandate also included addressing the presiding officers of Sri Lankan labour tribunals as part of a Delhi Judicial Academy event.
Bharadwaj's public service career, on the other hand, contrasts strongly with her current portrayal by India's National Investigative Agency (INA): as the shadowy leader of the banned Maoist party, smuggling arms, planting booby traps, and guiding strategy on armed operations.
Bharadwaj was arrested on August 28, 2018, and was among 16 'Bhima-Koregaon accused,' who have been charged under 10 sections of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, whose legal processes make proof of innocence or guilt essentially irrelevant.
When the first nine arrests were made in mid-2018, police accused Bharadwaj and others of conspiring to murder Prime Minister Narendra Modi and of giving speeches, sending emails, and distributing pamphlets which eventually prompted violence against Dalits in Bhima-Koregaon, 28 kilometres northeast of Pune.
After the arrests were made, the police held a press conference in September 2018, in the wake of severe criticism made by other activists, and stated that they had seized "thousands of letters" implicating the activists. Further, the NIA had unilaterally taken over the case from the Maharashtra police in January 2020, but had revealed little about the evidence that led to such serious charges.
Further, according to an Article 14 report, the evidence against Bhardwaj only "consists entirely of typed, undated, unsigned images of letters found on computers of other persons, which can¡¯t be proven in the court."?
For more on news and current affairs from around the world please visit Indiatimes News.