By Quaid Najmi

Mumbai, Aug 23 (IANS): In a shocking revelation, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has said that the accused in the Koregaon-Bhima and Elgar Parishad cases had allegedly recruited students of two top Indian universities for terror activities in the country and in Maharashtra.

The NIA statement comes in the draft charge sheet in the twin cases filed against 16 arrested accused and six other absconders in the sensational cases that have rocked the Indian polity for the past four years.

The draft charge sheet was filed before the NIA Special Court's Special Judge D.E. Kothalikar last week after long investigations into the twin cases.

As per the NIA, the accused had "recruited students from various universities including the two highly reputed Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai) for commission of terrorist activities".

They are accused of promoting the activities and ideologies of the banned outfits, mobilising people and students, training in handling sophisticated arms and explosives with the larger objective to conspire against and destabilise the government of India and Government of Maharashtra, threaten its sovereignty with large-scale violence, strike terror in the people, among other things.

For these objectives, the NIA said that the accused through the banned organisation and its frontal outfits, had arranged to raise Rs 8 crore for annual supplies of M-4 (sophisticated weapons) with 4,00,000 rounds and others arms from suppliers in Manipur and neighbouring country of Nepal to overawe and undermine the Centre and the Maharashtra governments.

The arrested accused in the cases are: Sudhir P. Dhawale, Vernon S. Gonsalves (both of Mumbai), Arun T. Fereira of Thane, Rona J. Wilson and Gautam Navlakha (all of New Delhi), Surendra P. Gadling, Shoma K. Sen, Mahesh S. Raut (all of Nagpur), P. Varavara Rao of Hyderabad, Sudha Bharadwaj of Faridabad, Anand B. Teltumbde of Yavatmal, Hany Babu M. Tharayil of Trichur, Sagar Gorkhe of Ahmednagar, Ramesh Gaichor of Pune, and the late Fr. Stan Lourduswamy of Tamil Nadu, who died on July 5 in Mumbai while in custody.

The accused named as absconders are: Milind Teltumbde aliases Dipak and Sahyadri of Yavatmal, Prakash Goswami aliases Navin and Ritupan Goswami of Assam, Kishan Bose aliases Prashanto of Kolkata, Mupalla Laxman Rao, alias Ganpati, Chandrashekhar, Manglu, and Deepu.

The NIA said that all the accused are 'active members' of the banned terrorist organisation CPI (Maoist) and its frontal organisations which were declared unlawful by the Union Home Ministry in 2009.

The frontal organisations listed by the NIA are: Kabir Kala Manch (which organised the Elgar Parishad at Pune on December 31, 2017, the alleged fallout of which were the caste riots in Koregaon-Bhima on January 1, 2018), Anuradha Ghandy Memorial Committee, Persecuted Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, Peoples Union for Democratic Rights, Coordination of Democratic Rights Organisation, Democratic Students Union, Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan, and Revolutionary Writers Association.