Elgar bail plea: Can't rely on seized documents as copies not given

A ctivist-lawyer Surendra Gadling argued before the special UAPA court on Tuesday that the electronic documents the Pune police seized in the Elgar Parishad case could not be relied on while deciding his bail

plea

because the prosecution had not yet provided their cloned

copies

to him and the other accused.


Gadling cited the case law of a higher court that if documents were not provided to an accused then those documents could not be relied on.

At a previous hearing, Gadling had submitted that the police's chargesheet without the cloned copies of the documents on which they had built their case against the accused was incomplete and that itself should be ground for his release on bail.

Lawyer Siddharth Patil, arguing for co-accused and activist Sudhir Dhawale's bail plea, submitted that none of the offences attributed to the applicant were made out in the chargesheets filed by the police. "Allegations that Dhawale was the main organizer of the Elgar Parishad, made an inflammatory speech, and raised funds for the event stand falsified by the police's own investigation," he said.

Patil cited a January 1, 2018, internal report of the Vishrambaug police's senior inspector to DCP (special branch) stating, among other things, that the Parishad was held under the leadership of Kishor Kamble and specifically named 95 organizations contributing funds for it. By the police's own admission, none of these 95 organizations were banned, he said.