Lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, Out On Bail After 3 Years In Jail: ‘I Am Ready To Put On My Black Coat’

By Dilip -

 After three years and three months in prison, Bhima-Koregaon accused and undertrial Sudha Bharadwaj was granted bail in December 2021 by the Bombay High Court on a technical ground. The human rights lawyer and law professor talked to us about her time in prison, the state of legal aid for forgotten undertrials, the need for courts to address congested prisons, particularly in the pandemic, and her plans to rebuild her life as a lawyer and a mother, as she grappled with bail conditions which prevent her from leaving Mumbai and Thane.

“I love this country, I love the people of Chhattisgarh, and I have no regrets,” 60-year-old advocate Sudha Bharadwaj told Article 14, weeks after she was granted bail by the Bombay High Court in the Bhima Koregaon conspiracy case. Arrested on 28 August 2018, Bharadwaj is among 16 ‘Bhima-Koregaon accused’ - lawyers, human rights activists, writers and academics - charged under 10 sections of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, whose legal processes, as a July 2020 Article 14 analysis showed, ensure that proof of innocence or guilt is essentially rendered irrelevant and bail very difficult. 

A human-rights lawyer, teacher and IIT graduate who gave up US citizenship and turned down an offer to be a high court judge, Bharadwaj was arrested from her house in Faridabad, where she had moved in 2017 to teach law at the National Law University Delhi. The arrest came after she spent nearly three decades working in Chhattisgarh as a trade unionist, providing legal aid to blue-collar workers and marginalised rural, often tribal, communities and villagers (see Article 14’s report on Bharadwaj’s work and the National Investigative Agency or NIA’’s charges against her here).

When the first nine arrests took place, the police accused Bharadwaj and others of plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and delivering speeches, sending emails and circulating pamphlets that sparked violence in January 2018 against Dalits in the town of Bhima-Koregaon, 28 km northeast of Pune city.  Despite the serious nature of the allegations made by the NIA, which unilaterally took over the case from the Maharashtra Police in January 2020, the trial has not yet started. 

Besides the 83-year-old poet, teacher and Maoist ideologue Varavara Rao, who was granted medical bail in February 2021 in view of his failing health in prison, Bharadwaj is the only accused to be granted bail. Most of the accused have spent more than three years in prison; 84-year-old Jesuit priest and sociologist Father Stan Swamy contracted Covid-19 and passed away as an undertrial in July 2021. The NIA special court, which set bail conditions, has barred Bharadwaj from speaking to the media about the case. It also rejected her request to be allowed to return to Chhattisgarh to her law practice, and has restricted her from moving out of Mumbai and Thane. ….

https://www.article-14.com/post/-i-am-ready-to-put-on-my-black-coat-lawyer-sudha-bharadwaj-out-on-bail-after-3-years-in-jail-61e63ae842e4d


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