Author: Vivek Deshpande
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 15 2013
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/maoist-sympathisers-planning-big-meet-in-delhi-say-police/1169338/0
Maoist sympathisers have been allegedly planning to organise a three-day International People's Tribunal (IPT), most likely in Delhi, in December by involving well-known academicians, journalists and artists to highlight the "impact of Operation Green Hunt (OGH) on the tribals".
According to senior police officers, the plan was revealed by one of the documents seized from Prashant Rahi, the alleged Maoist courier from Uttarakhand who was arrested recently at Deori in Gondia district. Police claimed the document, like many other papers, originated from G L Saibaba, a professor of English in Delhi University (DU) whose house in Delhi was searched recently by police.
The purported documents contain elaborate guidelines on how to prepare dossiers and compilation of "fact-finding" reports on the issue from various places, including Bastar, Saramanda, Latehar and Gadchiroli.
Incidentally, some activists were recently in Gadchiroli on a "fact-finding" mission and had claimed the Gadchiroli police had killed Maoist cadres in "cold blood".
"Affected people should be brought from the areas to depose before the tribunal," the documents say.
Among those to be mobilised for the conclave, according to the documents, are advocates taking up cases of encounter killings, political prisoners, journalists, activists, writers, artists, film-makers and academicians.
The names suggested for "core committee" include aliases or names such as Mangra, Ulyanov, Ravindra, BB, Tendulkar, Pavel, Azad, Chetan, Rumi.
The "jury" of the proposed IPT consists names such as Arundhati Roy, Rajinder Sachar, A P Shah, Sudershan Reddy and M Suresh.
For the "organising committee", the purported document suggests prominent names such as B D Sharma, Amit Bhaduri, Sumit Chakravarti, Randhir Singh, Parminder Singh, Amit Bhattacharya, Stan Swamy, K N Pandit, Ashok Bhowmick, Ranjit Verma, Madhur Bhaduri, Saroj Giti, P K Vijayan, Karel Gabriel, SAR Gilani, Bhojja Thakaram, Paresh Rawal, Nandita Das, Mahesh Bhatt, Raghubir Yadav, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Sagar Sarhadi, Mahasweta Devi, Romila Thapar and Kamini Jaiswal, among others.
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