UAPA fiasco in Telangana Premium

A case filed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act at the Tadvai Police station of Telangana’s Mulugu district, named 152 people, including leaders of various mass organisations and academics on August 19, 2022. File

A letter from Yedla Kishore, an activist of the Telangana Vidyarthi Vedika and lodged in jail, to a judge, seeking to know the number of cases filed by the police against him would have gone unnoticed if not for the Ranga Reddy district judge, who received the letter and promptly forwarded it to the Telangana Government to send a reply.

The reply to the letter brought out another case filed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) at the Tadvai Police station of Mulugu district, which named 152 people, including leaders of various mass organisations and academics such as Kishore and Ghanapuram Chandramouli of the Patriotic Democratic Movement (PDM), on August 19, 2022.

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They were booked under various sections of the UAPA because their names were found in the Maoist literature seized from a forest area during a combing operation.

Former Professor of University of Hyderabad G. Hargopal, former Professors of Osmania University Padmaja Shaw and Gaddam Laxman, Telangana High Court Advocates Association President V. Raghunath, former Judge of Mumbai High Court H. Suresh and top CPI (Maoist) leaders were among the people named in the FIR.

The action did not go down well with Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao, who was against slapping the draconian UAPA law in the case. The Mulugu Police have said that sufficient evidence was not found against the accused during the investigation. A memo is being filed in the court with a request to delete their names from the case.

The 52-page FIR has glaring gaps, including missing details such as the age, address and physical features of the accused. Names such as V. Raghunath and H. Suresh found in the FIR were picked up from an old letterhead of the Indian Association of People’s Lawyers (IAPL). Justice Suresh of the Mumbai High Court was earlier chairman of IAPL. In fact, Justice Suresh died in October 2020 but the FIR still names him in the case filed in 2022.