The Bombay High Court on Friday granted bail to Dalit scholar and ex-IIT professor Anand Teltumbde who was booked in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad cases.
A division bench of Justices A.S. Gadkari and Milind Jadhav granted the bail plea of Teltumbde, filed in 2021, challenging an order of the Special NIA Court rejecting his bail application.
However, the high court stayed the bail order for a week to allow the National Investigation Agency (NIA) appeal against it in the Supreme Court.
Teltumbde, 59, the brother-in-law of Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi President Dr Prakash Ambedkar, had surrendered to the National Investigation Agency in April 2020 following a Supreme Court order.
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Granting him bail on Rs 100,000 plus two sureties, the division bench noted that prima facie, UAPA sections for offences of unlawful activities, terrorist acts and conspiracy were not made out, though membership and support to a terror group was made out.
The NIA had accused Teltumbde of being the Convenor of the Elgar Parishad of December 31, 2017, where fiery speeches were made which allegedly resulted in a caste violence at Bhima-Koregaon, Pune on January 1, 2018, in which one person was killed.
