Hyderabad, Nov 19 : Hyderabad High Court had turned down Mr. Rao’s plea which sought the quashing of a transit remand issued by a Hyderabad magistrate.
A special court on Sunday remanded firebrand poet and literary critic P. Varavara Rao to police custody till November 26 for his alleged links with the CPI(ML).
The 78-year-old Mr. Rao, a revolutionary Telugu writer well-known for his vocal and trenchant anti-establishment views, was taken by into custody by a team of the Pune police from his residence in Hyderabad late Saturday after the Hyderabad High Court on November 15 had refused to extend his house arrest.
Mr. Rao, who has been charged with procuring arms for the Maoists, funding the spread of ‘Urban Naxalism’, as well as plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Modi among other things, was produced before the court late afternoon.
The Hyderabad High Court had turned down Mr. Rao’s plea which sought the quashing of a transit remand issued by a Hyderabad magistrate. This led the Pune police to take the noted poet into custody from his home on Saturday evening, amid impassioned scenes which saw a large number of Mr. Rao’s supporters condemning the arrest and raising slogans against the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Mr. Rao was first arrested on August 28 as part of a wider probe into the Elgaar Parishad and the subsequent Bhima-Koregaon clashes by the Pune police along with civil rights activists Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves.
However, on August 30, the Supreme Court had stayed the Pune police’s action by directing all Ms. Bharadwaj, Mr. Gonsalves, Mr. Ferreira, Mr. Rao and Mr. Navlakha to be placed under house arrest — a period which was extended from time to time.
On September 28, the Apex Court finally refused any further extensions, while granting a period of four-week period to the activists to exercise legal remedies available and rejecting a plea by historian Romila Thapar and others seeking the immediate release of the arrested activists.
Mr. Rao’s incendiary writings sympathetic to the plight of the downtrodden have brought him in continual conflict with the Telangana police and government in the past 40 years. Despite being charged in more than a score cases, he has been acquitted in every one of them.
Ms. Bharadwaj, Mr. Gonsalves and Mr. Ferreira, who are presently in judicial custody, have been charged with receiving funds from the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) and allegedly recruiting cadres from prominent educational establishments like the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in a bid to spread Naxalism.
