No mercy for urban Maoists Says Amit Shah

No mercy for urban Maoists Says Amit Shah as Lok Sabha okays anti-terror Bill
Hans News Service   |  24 July 2019 8:10 PM GMT
No mercy for urban Maoists Says Amit Shah as Lok Sabha okays anti-terror Bill
HIGHLIGHTS
The Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 

2019, amid a walkout by Congress and TMC MPs, who sought the Bill be sent to a 

Parliamentary standing committee for scrutiny.
New Delhi: The Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) 

Amendment Act, 2019, amid a walkout by Congress and TMC MPs, who sought the Bill be 

sent to a Parliamentary standing committee for scrutiny.

The Bill, tabled by Minister of State for Home G Kishan Reddy, seeks to introduce a 

provision in the anti-terror Act to designate individuals suspected to have terror links, instead 

of just organisations, as terrorists.

During a division of votes, demanded by AIMIM's Asaduddin Owaisi for consideration of the 

Bill, as many as 287 MPs supported it and only eight opposed it.During a debate in the Lok 

Sabha, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the amendments were necessary to root out 

terror and keep the law enforcement agencies a step ahead of terrorists.

Citing examples from other countries, Shah said, "UN has a procedure for it, US has it, 

Pakistan has it, China has it, Israel has it, European Union has it, everyone has done it."

In his speech, Shah lashed out at people behind urban Maoism, a term used by the BJP and 

its ideological allies for those it blames for supporting Maoists and said the government had 

no sympathy for them. "In the name of ideology, some people promote urban Maoism. We 

have no sympathy for them," he said.

The Congress under the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had brought in UAPA, he said, 

targeting the Opposition party, whose members earlier questioned the rationale behind the 

law.

Hitting out at the Congress for opposing the amendment, Shah said if the UPA was correct 

in amending anti-terror laws in their tenure, then so was the NDA. The Home Minister was 

referring to the POTA that was repealed by the UPA government in 2004.

Shah had last week said in Parliament that the UPA government had repealed POTA for 

"vote bank politics", and had the Act not been repealed 26/11 would probably not have 

happened.

"The only purpose of this law is to root out terrorism. We will ensure that this law will not be 

misused," he said. The Congress had earlier criticised the UAPA (Amendment) Bill, 2019, 

saying the legislation was being made more draconian by allowing individuals to be declared 

as terrorists rather than just organisations. The provision was also opposed by the YSRCP 

and DMK.

The UAPA Amendment Bill, 2019, amends the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. 

Under the Act, an investigating officer is required to obtain the prior approval of the 

director-general of police (DGP) to seize properties that may be connected with terrorism.

The Bill adds that if the investigation is conducted by an officer of the National Investigation 

Agency (NIA), the approval of the director-general of NIA would be required for seizure of 

such property. The bill additionally empowers the officers of the NIA, of the rank of inspector 

or above, to investigate cases.


Now urban Maoists
The Maharashtra police claim an urban Maoist thrust is underway and have arrests to show 

for it. Are the state urban centres hotbeds of Maoism or is it just another politically 

convenient conspiracy theory?
ADVERTISEMENT

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/the-big-story/story/20180625-urban-maoists-

maharashtra-1259936-2018-06-16


Kiran D Tare
June 16, 2018
ISSUE DATE: June 25, 2018UPDATED: September 7, 2018 10:48 IST

Violence in Maharashtra's Koregaon-Bhima in January 2018.
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.

Kadam claimed two Maoists, Deepu and Manglu, were in touch with Dhawale for over two  months before the Elgar Parishad took place. The speakers at the conference apparently  talked about overthrowing the Brahminical system and empowering Dalits. An 

unexceptionable ambition to most, but Deepu and Manglu have allegedly been involved in 

attacks on security personnel in Jharkhand, Odisha, Maharashtra and other states.

The arrests have sparked a new meme in public discourse: urban Maoism, which is being 

played up by the Sangh Parivar and its supporters as a new red peril infiltrating the states 

towns and cities and specifically tapping into the rich vein of Dalit resentment which has 

unnerved the BJP and RSS leadership. With 55 per cent of its 120 million population living 

in urban areas, Maharashtra is the most urbanised Indian state. In the last two years, the 

state has become a hotbed of caste conflict, with rallies and counter-rallies by Maratha and 

Dalit organisations.

Significantly, the new scare about urban Maoists comes at a time when the RSS leadership 

seems to have focused its strategy on countering a perceived alliance of forces fomenting 

popular unrest against the BJP. In the eyes of the Sangh Parivar, a Maoist hand can be seen 

in such diverse agitations as the caste clashes of Koregaon-Bhima (January 1), the anti-

mining protests in Tuticorin (May) and the Pathalgadi movement for tribal village autonomy in 

Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. The dark design in this view links the Congress party and key 

Dalit leaders, notably Jignesh Mevani, in an unholy alliance with Maoists.

From this perspective, Maoists are looking at cities to expand and exploit the fissures 

created by caste divides. The suspected urban thrust (apparently thwarted by the recent 

arrests) is seen to have coincided tellingly with left-wing extremists rapidly losing ground in 

the states remote eastern districts, such as Gadchiroli, in the face of combat operations by 

the state police and an extensive outreach to villagers by the administration.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced on June 7 that the state had enough evidence 

to nail the Maoists and asked the police not to leave any stone unturned in curbing their 

activities. Maharashtra director general of police Satish Mathur said the arrests by the Pune 

police were part of the strategy to root out Maoism.

The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has flagged Maoism in urban Maharashtra as a security 

challenge. In a report submitted in February, the IB has identified the smaller cities, such as 

Jalgaon, Amalner, Aurangabad, Wardha, Parbhani and Nanded, apart from metros like 

Mumbai and Pune, as breeding centres for urban Maoism. The police got alarmed in the last 

week of May when graffiti paying homage to the Maoists of Gadchiroli emerged on 

Mumbai's local trains.

If graffiti on trains seems rather slender evidence for an elaborate conspiracy to suborn the 

state, a more sensational story was soon on offer when public prosecutor Pawar revealed 

on June 7 that a letter describing a plot to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi by targeting his 

roadshows had been discovered on Wilson's laptop. While this revelation briefly amplified 

the new red scare, with ministers, including Nitin Gadkari, weighing in, it was also received 

with some scepticism by prominent politicians, notably Sharad Pawar, who described the 

alleged letter as a ploy to garner peoples sympathy. However, an IB officer points to Modis 

cancelled roadshow in Ahmedabad in December last year and his travel by a seaplane 

instead to indicate that the threat was very real.

Urban Maoism might sound like an oxymoron because of the popular perception that 

Maoism is a rural insurgency. The CPI (Maoist) 2007 handbook Strategy and Tactics of the 

Indian Revolution outlines the blueprint of their plan to overthrow the Indian state, first in the 

countryside where the enemy (state) is weak and then to gradually encircle and capture 

cities. The urban movement, the Maoist handbook notes, is one of the main sources of 

cadres and leadership, responsible for supplies, technology, expertise, information. The 

handbook exhorts the party to mobilise Dalits for the revolutionary movement. According to 

social activist Datta Shirke of the Jan Sangharsh Samiti, which works in the Maoist heartland 

of Gadchiroli, Maoists have indeed begun to invoke Dalit icon B.R. Ambedkar's name in their 

propaganda.

Nor is it the alleged Maoist sympa­thiser Dhawale's first brush with the law. In 2011, he was 

arrested from Wardha railway station for alleged links with Maoists. but he was acquitted 

after four years for lack of evidence. Another organisation, the Kabir Kala Manch (KKM), 

formed in 2002, has been under the scanner for allegedly invoking Maoism in the name of 

Ambedkar. In April, the Pune police raided the homes of four KKM activists, Harshali Potdar, 

Jyoti Jagtap, Ramesh Ghaichor and Deepak Dhengle.

Potdar and Jagtap allege the government is defaming Ambedkarite activists by branding 

them Maoists. Ambedkarite activists are arrested more than six months after the 

Koregaon-Bhima violence because they demanded the arrest of Hindutva leader Sambhaji 

Bhide, said Jagtap. Former Bombay High Court justice B.G. Kolse-Patil points out that 

Dhawale has been acquitted earlier. The court had clearly said that merely possessing 

Maoist literature is not sufficient to call anyone a Maoist. He/ she must be overtly involved in 

violence, he says.


The Elgar Parishad in Pune on December 31, 2017. Among the attendees were Gujarat 

MLA Jignesh Mevani, student activist Umar Khalid and Dalit activist Radhika Vemula.
Dhawale's lawyer Siddharth Patil says the police wasted time in investigating the contents in 

his laptop which was already seized in April. They have applied charges under the Unlawful 

Activities (Prevention) Act. Under this act, the local police do not have any authority to 

investigate the case. We want investigation by a competent central agency, he says.

A think-tank, the Forum for Integrated National Security (FINS), whose office-bearers are 

associated with the RSS, had submitted a report to the Maharashtra government in March, 

detailing how Dhawale's organisation, the Republican Panthers, mobilised Dalits all through 

2017 and allegedly instigated violence at the Koregaon-Bhima event, staged as a homage 

to the outnumbered Dalit soldiers of the British East India Company who fought against the 

upper caste Peshwa army. We noticed from the literature distributed that they had a greater 

plan to disturb law and order, claims Captain Smita Gaikwad, a fellow with FINS. The 

Maharashtra government, however, refused to accept the findings of this report as it blamed 

the police for negligence.

Dalit leaders Ramdas Athawale and Prakash Ambedkar have also weighed in on the issue, 

in contrasting voices. While Athawale, a junior minister for social justice and empowerment 

in the Modi government, has appealed to Dalit youths not to associate with Maoists, he did 

register some discomfort at the arrests. If the activists arrested are followers of Babasaheb 

Ambedkar, they should not be considered Maoists. There should be a thorough 

investigation, Athawale said.

Prakash Ambedkar, who had already voiced his objection at the arrest of the KKM and Elgar 

Parishad leaders in April, contrasted the arrest of the activists to the free run of Hindutva 

leaders. He is not the first to point out that Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide, two Hindutva 

leaders who are among the original accused for the Koregaon-Bhima riots, are free men. 

Ekbote is out on bail while Fadnavis has given a clean chit to Bhide. The government is 

pursuing innocents instead of arresting the real culprits, Ambedkar said.



Urban Naxals case accused Gautam Navlakha had links with Hizbul, states Rona Wilson's 

report
The report reportedly prepared by Maoist cadres was recovered by Pune police while they 

were trying to retrieve old documents from laptops of the other arrested accused.
ADVERTISEMENT


Divyesh Singh
New Delhi
July 25, 2019UPDATED: July 25, 2019 00:02 IST

Gautam Navlakha (File photo | PTI)
The Pune police on Wednesday filed a report in connection with the Urban Naxals case 

accused Gautam Navlakha's petition which hinted at his links with Hizbul Mujahideen in 

Kashmir.

The report reportedly prepared by Maoist cadres was recovered by Pune police while they 

were trying to retrieve old documents from laptops of the other arrested accused.

According to the report which has been recovered from the laptop of Urban Naxals case 

accused Rona Wilson, Gautam Navlakha named as GN in the report was in touch with 

several separatists in Kashmir and some commanders of Hizbul Mujahideen.

The report reportedly written in 2013 mentions that Navlakha made several trips to Kashmir 

and met Shakil Bakshi, a HM commander.

Later, he was also in touch with Parvez Khan who was earlier a Hizbul commander and then 

turned double agent. Navalakha met HM commander on behalf of Maoists to exchange arms 

and ammunition and also to help, but Maoist leadership reporter had no idea about it.

Also, he sent Khan to meet Maoist commander in Delhi on behalf of HM but Maoist fact 

finding team found that Khan was a double agent. HM reportedly wanted to establish a 

relation with Maoists in order to get access to Myanmar border areas to secure weapons.

The report also states that Gautam Navlakha was working for the government and against 

Maoists on many occasions.

He spoke against the Maoist movement and also tried to force them into accepting offers 

from the UPA government. The report talks about his meetings with Sonia Gandhi and Ilena 

Sen, wife of Binayak Sen and Chidambaram for his release from jail in 2009.

The report also talks about Maoist cadres located in foreign countries and other accused 

involved in the case.