Mumbai: After over six years and six months of incarceration, the Bombay high court today, January 9, granted bail to two human rights defenders, Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawale.

Both Wilson and Dhawale were among the first group of human rights activists to be arrested in the highly contentious Elgar Parishad case over what law enforcement claimed was their alleged Maoist links. Their bail in the high court, granted by a bench of Justice A.S. Gadkari and Justice Kamal Khata, came after an appeal was filed by their lawyers following rejections by the trial court.

On June 6, 2018, in a coordinated operation, the Pune police had sent several teams to various locations across India where activists were based. Wilson, originally from Kerala, was arrested in Delhi, a place where he had lived and worked from for many years as a prisoners’ rights activist. Dhawale, an editor of the Vidrohi magazine, was picked up from his residence in Mumbai.

The case, which was originally handled by the Pune police, was handed over to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in early 2020 after the BJP government fell in Maharashtra and the Mahavikas Aghadi coalition took over. All along, both the Pune police and the NIA have maintained that Wilson was one of the masterminds of the so-called “urban Naxal” movement and was involved in introducing young students from........

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