SC grants bail to Gonsalves, Ferreira in Bhima Koregaon case. Know more about the activists

The Supreme Court on Friday granted bail to activists Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case considering their long incarceration. The activists were facing charges under the UAPA for their alleged Maoist links. A bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Sudhanshu Dhulia said Gonsalves and Ferreira shall not leave Maharashtra. The duo were also asked to surrender their passports to the police.

The activists had moved the top court against a Bombay High Court order rejecting their bail pleas.

Who is Vernon Gonsalves?

• A former academic, sixty-six-year-old Gonsalves has worked in some of the prominent colleges in Mumbai, including HR College of Commerce and Economics, and Akbar Peerbhoy College of Commerce and Economics. A social activist and writer, Gonsalves wrote for online publications regularly.
• Gonsalves was charged in many police cases earlier. In 2013, he walked out of jail after spending nearly six years in various Mumbai prisons.
• Vernon Gonsalves was not a regular writer until 2013. During his time in the prisons, Gonsalves started writing short stories. After he was released in 2014, the activist started writing regularly.
• Gonsalves wrote extensively on Dalit and tribal rights and the condition of prisons in India. The activist was also vocal about wanting the UAPA to be scrapped.
• Along with the other four activists, Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, and Gautam Navlakha, Gonsalves was critical of the establishment.

Who is Arun Ferreira, the other activist granted bail in the case?

• Arun Ferreira is a human rights activist and lawyer.
• Like many other activists, he was slapped with the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, sedition, and other anti-terror-related offenses in connection with the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case.
• Ferreira was first arrested in 2007 for an alleged conspiracy to blow up the Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur, the site where Dr. B.R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in October 1956.
• Arun Ferreira wrote a book titled ‘Colors of the Cage-A Prison Memoir’ on his sufferings inside the prison. In the words of writer Arundhati Roy, the book provides “a clear-eyed, unsentimental account of custodial torture, years of imprisonment on false cases and flagrant violation of rule of law. His experience is shared by tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women most of whom do not have access to lawyers or legal aid”.
• Ferreira also worked with legal professionals in the country to secure the release of other political prisoners arrested on trumped-up charges of sedition, UAPA, etc.