Supreme Court says 5 arrested activists to only be kept under house arrest

The Supreme Court said Wednesday that the five activists arrested yesterday by Pune Police were not to be transferred to Maharashtra but were to be kept under house arrest till September 5.

"Dissent is the safety valve of democracy," the court had said earlier.

"If dissent is not allowed, then the pressure cooker may burst," the court added.

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The court also issued a notice to the Maharashtra government asking for its reply by September 5. The court will hear the case again on September 6.

The order was passed by a three-judge bench of CJI Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud on a petition filed against the arrests by, among others, the historian Romila Thapar, the Delhi University professor Satish Deshpande, and the former JNU professor Prabhat Patnaik.

The five activists were arrested Wednesday after the Pune Police carried out raids in five different states.

The lawyer and trade union activists Sudha Bharadwaj was arrested from Faridabad in Haryana. Bharadwaj practises at the Chhattisgarh high court in Bilaspur. (She is also a visiting professor at the National Law University, Delhi.)

The others arrested included the poet Varavara Rao, who was arrested from his home in Hyderabad.

The activists Arun Fereira and Vernon Gonsalves were arrested from Mumbai, as was civil liberties activist Gautam Navlakha from Delhi.

"A team of 10 people came today morning. They didn't have a search warrant but were carrying another document. They checked our mobile phones and laptops and took all passwords," Bharadwaj's daughter Maaysha told ANI after her arrest.

The blowback against the arrests was swift, with the opposition and civil society calling the arrests a coup against the Constitution, and fascist in nature.

The historian Ramachandra Guha said that, as a biogrpaher of Mahatma Gandhi, he was certain Gandhi would have donned his lawyer's robes and defended Bharadwaj in court. That is, he added, "assuming the Modi Sarkar hadn't yet detained and arrested him too."