Hyderabad: P Hemalata, wife of revolutionary poet Varavara Rao, yesterday wrote an open letter to the Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi to release him. Rao is currently lodged in a Pune prison.
Her open letter has been endorsed by about 100 intellectuals and others in Hyderabad and Telangana and it was also posted on an online petitions site. More than 660 people from all over the world endorsed it, said a media report.
In the letter, She requested the Chief Justice to look into the malafide intentions and the manner in which the case was made out and also order his immediate release pending the judicial trial.
She claimed in the letter that Rao has been wrongly accused, along with others, in the Koregaon Bhima violence case and that he had nothing to do with the incident. She alleged that the poet was arrested to silence his voice.
“While he has nothing to do with the initial Bhima Koregaon violence (in fact the original perpetrators are not booked at all), I strongly suspect that my husband is implicated in the case just to silence his voice,” she claimed. She had further said that several law courts had pronounced him innocent.
A total of 25 cases in the last 45 years has been slapped against Rao. Of them, he was set free in 13 cases, while 12 were withdrawn by the state even before trial.
Hemalatha claimed that the poet has also been implicated in another case in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, to prevent him from coming out on bail in the Pune case.
She said that she was appealing to the CJI because of his age and failing health. She said she was not at all questioning the due process of law. “However, a person who has no criminal record and a person on whom police filed about 25 cases vindictively as he was professing unpalatable views to the powers that be cannot be subjected to incarceration at the age of 79, just because a police official fabricated some so-called evidence,” Hemalata said.