In a shocking revelation, the National Investigation
Agency (NIA) has said that the accused in the Koregaon-Bhima and Elgar Parishad
cases had allegedly recruited students of two top Indian universities for
terror activities in the country and in Maharashtra.
The NIA statement comes in the draft charge sheet in the
twin cases filed against 16 arrested accused and six other absconders in the
sensational cases that have rocked the Indian polity for the past four years.
The draft charge sheet was filed before the NIA Special
Court's Special Judge D.E. Kothalikar last week after long investigations into
the twin cases.
As per the NIA, the accused had "recruited students
from various universities including the two highly reputed Jawaharlal Nehru
University (New Delhi) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) for
commission of terrorist activities".
They are accused of promoting the activities and
ideologies of the banned outfits, mobilising people and students, training in
handling sophisticated arms and explosives with the larger objective to
conspire against and destabilise the government of India and Government of
Maharashtra, threaten its sovereignty with large-scale violence, strike terror
in the people, among other things.
For these objectives, the NIA said that the accused
through the banned organisation and its frontal outfits, had arranged to raise
Rs 8 crore for annual supplies of M-4 (sophisticated weapons) with 4,00,000
rounds and others arms from suppliers in Manipur and neighbouring country of Nepal
to overawe and undermine the Centre and the Maharashtra governments.
The arrested accused in the cases are: Sudhir P. Dhawale,
Vernon S. Gonsalves (both of Mumbai), Arun T. Fereira of Thane, Rona J. Wilson
and Gautam Navlakha (all of New Delhi), Surendra P. Gadling, Shoma K. Sen,
Mahesh S. Raut (all of Nagpur), P. Varavara Rao of Hyderabad, Sudha Bharadwaj
of Faridabad, Anand B. Teltumbde of Yavatmal, Hany Babu M. Tharayil of Trichur,
Sagar Gorkhe of Ahmednagar, Ramesh Gaichor of Pune, and the late Fr. Stan
Lourduswamy of Tamil Nadu, who died on July 5 in Mumbai while in custody.
The accused named as absconders are: Milind Teltumbde
aliases Dipak and Sahyadri of Yavatmal, Prakash Goswami aliases Navin and
Ritupan Goswami of Assam, Kishan Bose aliases Prashanto of Kolkata, Mupalla
Laxman Rao, alias Ganpati, Chandrashekhar, Manglu, and Deepu.
The NIA said that all the accused are 'active members' of
the banned terrorist organisation CPI (Maoist) and its frontal organisations
which were declared unlawful by the Union Home Ministry in 2009.
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The frontal organisations listed by the NIA are: Kabir Kala Manch (which organised the Elgar Parishad at Pune on December 31, 2017, the alleged fallout of which were the caste riots in Koregaon-Bhima on January 1, 2018), Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee, Persecuted Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, Peoples Union for Democratic Rights, Coordination of Democratic Rights Organisation, Democratic Students Union, Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan, and Revolutionary Writers Association.