The top court of India’s Maharashtra state has, for an eighth time, refused to hear a plea seeking to clear late Jesuit Father Stan Swamy from an anti-terror case that includes a plot to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Justice Revati Mohite-Dere of the Bombay High Court recused herself from hearing the plea on Sept. 20 that wanted to remove Swamy’s name from the seven-year-old Elgar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case filed against 16 leading activists in the country. The legal term recuse means that a person is unqualified to perform legal duties because of a potential conflict of interest or lack of impartiality. The judges have rescued themselves from hearing the case on seven earlier occasions. However, a lawyer following the case told that these judges have not explicitly expressed their potential conflicts of interest in the case. Petitioner, Jesuit Father Frazer Mascarenhas, based in Mumbai, Maharashtra’s capital, said “this was the eighth bench in the high court refusing to hear the case.” No bench in the high court is willing to hear the case “because it is clearly in our favour,” said Mascarenhas, whom the Jesuits appointed as a delegate to file the case in December 2021 after Swamy’s custodial death on July 5, 2021. “We still do not know why eight benches refused to hear this case. It is a clear case of justice being denied to Father Swamy,” Mascarenhas said. The judges fear “retribution from the government,” Father Mascarenhas told on Sept. 23. The 84-year-old Swamy was arrested on Oct. 8, 2020, from his residence in Ranchi in eastern Jharkhand state. He was accused of offenses such as sedition, having links with the outlawed Maoist group, and being part of a conspiracy to kill Modi. He died in a Mumbai hospital as a prisoner on July 5, 2021, after being denied bail on medical grounds despite suffering from multiple age-related ailments.
Rights activists say Swamy was arrested because he opposed the policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in his state and marshalled tribal people to oppose them. A recent report by Massachusetts-based Arsenal Consulting, a digital forensics firm, disclosed Swamy was arrested based on evidence planted on his computer’s hard drive by hacking it. Along with 15 others, Swamy was accused of a role in instigating mob violence in Bhima Koregaon in Maharashtra on Jan. 1, 2018, which left one dead and several others hurt. All the accused persons in the Bhima Koregaon case are leading academics, writers and human rights activists like Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, and poet Varavara Rao. In 1818, the battle of Bhima Koregaon was fought between the Maratha confederacy and the British East India Company, whose forces included members of the Dalit community. The celebration of the 200th anniversary by Dalits turned violent as they were opposed by pro-Hindu groups.