Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren questioned the Centre over the arrest of the Jesuit priest and human rights activist Stan Swamy. He asked why the government was insistent on crushing every voice of dissent.
The National Investigation Agency on Thursday night took Swamy into custody from his home in Ranchi, in connection with the Bhima Koregaon case.
Soon after, the CM took to Twitter and asked, “What message does the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre want to give by arresting 83-year-old Stan Swamy who voiced the concerns of the poor, the deprived, the Adivasis?”
He added, “Why this stubborn insistence on crushing every voice of dissent?”
In a statement released on Thursday, the 83-year-old man said he had recently been interrogated by the NIA for 15 hours over a span of five days – July 27 to July 30 and then on August 6. The investigating officials presented several extracts of information allegedly taken from his computer implicating his connection to “Maoist forces”.
On Friday, the court sent Swamy to judicial custody till October 23. He is the sixteenth person to be arrested in the case. Several others have been booked under sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
