Now Urban Maoists

The Maharashtra police claim an ‘urban Maoist’ thrust is underway and have arrests to show for it. Are the state’s urban centres hotbeds of Maoism or is it just another politically convenient conspiracy theory?

- Kiran D. Tare

IN the early hours of June 6, the Pune city police arrested five activists from Mumbai, Nagpur and Delhi in connection with provocative speeches made at a conference in Pune on December 31 last year. The speeches made at the Elgar Parishad allegedly incited violence on January 1 in nearby Koregaon Bhima, where around 300,000 Dalits had gathered. One person was killed in the riots that later spread across Maharashtra.

Police have accused Surendra Gadling, Shoma Sen and Mahesh Raut from Nagpur, Sudhir Dhawale from Mumbai and Rona Wilson from Delhi of “misleading the Dalits and ingraining hardline thinking of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) to create a rift between communities”. Pune joint commissioner of police Ravindra Kadam said, “They have been booked for getting funds from Maoists to organise Elgar Parishad.” The police claim to have found evidence in Wilson’s laptop that the Parishad was funded by Maoists and that the event was preceded by two months of preparation.

The public prosecutor, Ujjwala Pawar, claimed in court that the evidence shows that funds were provided by the CPI (Maoist) to ‘comrade Sudhir’ for the Koregaon-Bhima ‘task’ and ‘Comrades Shoma and Surendra’ were authorised to provide funds for programmes in future.

Kadam said the Maoist suspects had been under watch for a long time. “They are the urban face of Maoists and it is their strategy to influence urban masses who feel deprived or nurture a sense of discrimination by the state,” Kadam said. The accused were booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, under which the maximum sentence is seven years.