NEW DELHI:
Supreme Court
Tuesday paved the way for social activist Gautam
Navlakha
to come out on
bail
in the Elgar Parishad case as it lifted the stay on Bombay HC order granting him relief.
A bench of Justices M M Sundresh and SVN Bhatti refused to extend the stay and said, “We are of the view that there is no need to extend the interim order of stay.
The appellant has been in incarceration for more than four years and charges are yet to be framed. The trial would take years and years and years for its completion. Thus, without going into the respective contention, we are not inclined to extend the stay.”
It also directed Navlakha to pay Rs 20 lakh towards expenses for security in house arrest. He has been under house arrest since Nov 2022, after SC allowed him to come out of jail on health grounds.
Bombay HC had granted bail to Navlakha on Dec 19 last year, but kept its order in abeyance for three weeks after NIA, the anti-terror probe agency, sought time to appeal the order in SC, which extended the stay.
Navlakha is the seventh out of 16 accused to get bail in the case. Earlier, Sudha Bharadwaj, Anand Teltumbde, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Varavara Rao and Shoma Sen were granted bail. The case relates to alleged inflammatory speeches made at the Elgar Parishad conclave in Pune on Dec 31, 2017, which police claim triggered violence the next day near the Koregaon-Bhima war memorial on the outskirts of the city.
