Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Friday, June 12, issued notice to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on a petition by Telugu poet P Varavara Rao seeking permission to shift his residence to Hyderabad, with the 85-year-old Bhima Koregaon accused saying he can no longer afford to live in Mumbai.
A division bench of Justices Ajay Gadkari and Kamal Khata directed the NIA to file its reply within two weeks.
Rao, booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in the Bhima Koregaon violence case, has challenged a March 16 order of a special NIA court that dismissed his application to reside in Hyderabad.
As a condition of his bail, Rao is not permitted to leave Mumbai.
The Supreme Court had in 2022 granted him bail on medical grounds. Last year, it refused to modify the condition requiring him to seek prior permission from the trial court before leaving Greater Mumbai.
Rao was arrested on August 28, 2018, and moved to Taloja jail the following November. When his health deteriorated in 2020, he was shifted to the hospital. The High Court granted him a six-month medical bail in February 2021 and extended it periodically. In April 2022, the court declined to grant permanent bail but extended the medical bail by three months.
The Supreme Court subsequently extended the bail until further orders while hearing his special leave petition.
The Bhima Koregaon case
The NIA has charged Rao and 14 others with furthering the agenda of the banned CPI (Maoist) and conspiring to overthrow the government, primarily on the basis of letters and emails recovered from their electronic devices.
The agency has alleged that the Elgar Parishad cultural event in Pune on December 31, 2017, was part of a criminal conspiracy, and that incendiary speeches at the gathering triggered the caste violence at Bhima Koregaon the next day.
The accused have maintained that the electronic evidence against them was planted, and that most of them had neither attended the event nor were named in the original first information report.
