Elgar Parishad Case: In Jail For Over Five Years, Jyoti Jagtap Given Interim Bail by SC
Mumbai: The Supreme Court on Wednesday (November 19) granted cultural activist Jyoti Jagtap interim bail in the Elgar Parishad case in which she has spent five years and six months in jail.
Her interim bail will continue until the next hearing, scheduled for February 2026. Her long-drawn struggle to secure regular bail has involved multiple petitions before various benches from the trial court up to the apex court.
Jagtap, one of the three women to be arrested in the case and the only one to still be behind bars, was granted interim relief by the division bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and Satish Chandra Sharma. The other two – lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj and retired professor Shoma Ghosh – are already out on bail.
Since the first round of arrests that began in June 2018, 16 human rights defenders and academics in all were arrested in the case. Of them, five persons including Jagtap continue to be incarcerated and the rest are either on full or interim bail.
The other human rights defenders who continue to languish in jail are lawyer Surendra Gadling, Delhi University professor Hany Babu, and cultural activists Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor.
Eighty-four-year-old Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist Stan Swamy, one of the persons to be arrested in the case, died while in custody on July 5, 2021 due to COVID-19 and after failing to get adequate and timely medical care.
The decision on Jagtap's interim bail came following her lawyer senior advocate Aparna Bhat's statement before the court that Jagtap has suffered incarceration for over five and half years. Advocate Karishma Maria also appeared for Jagtap.
A cultural activist once associated with the Kabir Kala Manch (KMM), Jagtap was arrested on September 8, 2020. The KKM eventually came to be banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has claimed that Jagtap was a part of the team that organised the Elgar Parishad in Pune's Shaniwarwada area on December 31, 2017.
Initially handled by the Pune police, the case was later taken over by the NIA. Both agencies have accused the Elgar Parishad of inciting the violence that broke out at Bhima Koregaon, over 30 kilometres away from Pune, on January 1, 2018.
Before Jagtap, the same bench had granted her co-defendant Mahesh Raut interim bail on medical grounds. Raut, who was earlier granted bail by the Bombay high court on September 21, 2023, continued to languish in jail until two months ago after the NIA challenged the bail order in the apex court.
A tribal rights activist and scholar from Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, Raut has struggled with several health complications and needed urgent medical intervention. The Supreme Court granted him interim bail until November 26. The court today also extended his interim bail until the next hearing.
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