Seven inmates at the Taloja Central Prison in Navi Mumbai, awaiting trial in the 2018 Elgaar Parishad case, on Saturday evening ended the hunger strike that they had started on Friday to protest against police who didn’t produce them in court for successive hearings.

Delhi University teacher Jenny Rowena, the wife of one of the prisoners Hany Babu M.T., told this newspaper that co-accused Surendra Gadling had informed his son about their strike during a phone call supervised by the jail authorities on Friday night. On Saturday evening, the strike was temporarily called off after the jail superintendent assured the inmates that they would be produced in court on October 24.

“The judge had asked the police to produce them in the court, yet they weren’t. They have petitioned the Maharashtra governor as well. The jail authorities have been
telling them that guards are not available to escort them to the court, but they don’t
believe this excuse.” she told The Telegraph.

Non-availability of police escorts is a common reason for undertrials not being produced in courts across India.

Gadling, a lawyer from Nagpur, is arguing his own case. In a hearing on October 9, he argued on video conference from the prison, following which all seven were summoned to the court again on Friday.

Sixteen intellectuals, academics, lawyers and activists have been arrested during an investigation into the alleged Maoist links to an Ambedkarite event called Elgaar Parishad in Maharashtra’s Pune on December 31, 2017, which was followed by caste clashes the next day near Koregaon Bhima village that claimed a life.

Among the accused, Telugu litterateur Varavara Rao, lawyers Sudha Bharadwaj and Arun Ferreira, and academics Anand Teltumbde, Vernon Gonsalves, Shoma Sen and activist Gautam Navlakha are out on bail. Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit activist of Jharkhand, died of post-Covid complications while in judicial custody in Mumbai in 2021.

Marathi balladeer Jyoti Jagtap is in Byculla women’s jail in Mumbai, and the seven male accused are in Taloja jail.

In 2022, co-accused Sagar Gorkhe of the Kabir Kala Manch went on a hunger strike, demanding basic amenities after Taloja staff members seized his mosquito net.

Besides Babu, Gadling and Gorkhe, other inmates who went on hunger strike on Friday include balladeer Ramesh Gaichor, activists Mahesh Raut and Rona Wilson, and journalist Sudhir Dhawale. They have been in prison for four to six years already, and the trial has not begun.

While in jail, Gadling and Gorkhe have highlighted alleged corruption there.

Independent technical reports, which courts have not admitted, suggested that evidence against some of the accused was planted on their electronic devices.