From 1998, the year in which Minal married Nagpur-based lawyer Surendra Gadling, she would urge him to lodge a complaint every time he told her about the police issuing threats to him. Gadling had incurred their wrath because of fighting cases, often pro bono, of poor Adivasis jailed for being Maoist. His triumphs suggested that either the police were guilty of shoddy investigations or, worse, guilty of foisting false cases on them.

Two decades later, on June 6, 2018, Gadling was among the five who were arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for executing an alleged Maoist plan to foment violence at Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018. The list of the arrestees, over the next two years, grew from five to 16, all of them intellectuals and activists. Of the 16, Father Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest from Jharkhand, died in incarceration. Another 14, one by one, were released from prison on bail

The only person among the 16 still in jail is Surendra Gadling. Even he would have been free but for the perceived machinations of law-enforcing agencies and the indifference or reluctance of judges to protect the liberty of persons accused, even on dodgy evidence, of being Maoist or waging war against the state.

The Bombay High Court, as early as October 24, 2018, granted default bail to Gadling in the Bhima Koregaon (BK) violence case. The reason for doing so was that the procedure of extending the time limit for filing a chargesheet from 90 days of an arrest to 180 days, as laid out in the UAPA, had not been followed in Gadling’s case. The court, however, granted seven days to the Pune police (the case was transferred to the National Investigation Agency only in January 2020) to appeal against the bail order in the Supreme Court.

Even as the appeal was admitted in the Supreme Court, the Pune police recorded the statement of Sudarshan Ramteke, a surrendered Maoist, who claimed he had been asked by Gadling to oppose mining at Surajgarh in Gadchiroli district. Ramteke’s statement was made in the context of 39 lorries being set on fire there in December 2016. His confession should have become the basis of making him an accused in what is known as the Surajgarh arson case, which initially had only five accused. All of them were granted bail in March 2017. Ramteke was not arraigned in the case.

His 2018 incriminatory statement against Gadling was the second such instance. The first occurred when Gadling was defending G.N. Saibaba, the late Delhi University professor, in the Gadchiroli Sessions Court, where he was being tried for having links with the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and waging war against the state. Even then, Gadling came under intense police pressure. In A Quest for Freedom: The Story of Bhima Koregaon Conspiracy, a booklet that civil society organisations published, Gadling is quoted saying, “The police officers investigating the [Saibaba] case would casually tell me I was next in the line.”

That Gadling was “next in the line” became evident when Ramteke recorded a statement with a Magistrate, First Class, in March 2016, roughly a year before Saibaba was convicted (he was subsequently exonerated). In this statement, Ramteke said that after he was released from prison in 2011, where he had been imprisoned for his links with Maoists, Gadling persuaded him to rejoin the CPI(Maoist) for carrying out its clandestine activities. Ramteke has also incriminated some other accused in the BK case.

Ramteke’s statement was tucked in the “paper book”—a term that refers to an assortment of pleas and documents stitched together like a book—of the Saibaba case. Although Ramteke’s statement did not lead to Gadling being charge-sheeted, its inclusion in the paper book was interpreted as an attempt to intimidate him. But he did not discontinue representing Dalits and putting the police in the dock.

Did Gadling pay a price for his defiance?

Consider this: in December 2018, armed afresh with Ramteke’s statement on the Surajgarh arson, a good two years after its occurrence, the Gadchiroli police arrested Gadling from Yerawada Central Jail, Pune, where he had been lodged for his alleged role in the BK violence. It would seem the police were ensuring Gadling would remain in jail in case the Supreme Court upheld the default bail granted to him. It did not, on February 13, 2019.

A new UAPA case against Gadling for his alleged role in the Surajgarh arson had a severe consequence for him, for he could not be released from jail even if granted bail on the ground of prolonged incarceration in the BK case. There was, after all, a serious case still pending against him. Prolonged incarceration was the reason why the Bombay High Court released Sudhir Dhawale and Rona Wilson in January 2025. They were arrested along with Gadling in June 2018.

The Surajgarh arson case became Gadling’s new battlefield. He futilely applied for bail twice at the Sessions Court, Gadchiroli, where the Surajgarh case had been committed. When it was rejected the second time, he went in appeal to the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court on April 27, 2022.

Four months later, in August, a new dilatory tactic was adopted by the state at the Sessions Court. It filed an application saying the Surajgarh arson case should be put in abeyance until the BK case was decided. Its reason: since the set of evidence was common to both cases, the same should be transferred to Gadchiroli only after the trial in the BK case was completed.

Given that charges had not even been framed in the BK case, the application for abeyance implied a deliberate attempt to prolong Gadling’s incarceration. To obviate this possibility, Gadling, on December 6, 2022, filed an application for discharge from the case.

The state’s application for abeyance was filed with the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, which still refused bail to Gadling, who then went in appeal to the Supreme Court on August 31, 2023.

Here the bail application was turned into a spectacle of “pass-the-parcel”. It first went to Justice Aniruddha Bose, whose notice and subsequent reminders to Maharashtra to file its reply to Gadling’s bail application went unheeded. Nearly a year later, on July 24, 2024, the application arrived before the bench of Justice M.M. Sundresh, who just would not act upon it. In a piece vividly outlining Sundresh’s style of handling Gadling’s application, Frontline’s columnist Saurav Das wrote, “When liberty itself is at stake, such judicial lethargy begins to look less like a usual delay and more like a deliberate design.” Coincidentally, three days after Das’ piece was published, Sundresh recused himself from the case.

No less farcical were the happenings at the Sessions Court, Aheri, to which the Surajgarh case was transferred from Gadchiroli. For instance, from July 25, 2019, to October 28, 2025, a total of 208 dates were given for the case. Eighty-four of these were infructuous because either the judge or the additional public prosecutor was not there.

For years, Gadling’s appearances in the court have been through video-conferencing, with the internet connection often snapping. The police have justified not physically presenting him in the court on the ground that he faced a security threat, which Prakash R. Kadam, of the Aheri Sessions Court, in his October order last year, found far-fetched. Video-conferencing, Kadam said, hampered Gadling from arguing his discharge from the case.

On September 3, 2025, Gadling’s bail application pending in the Supreme Court was assigned to the bench headed by J.K. Maheshwari, who, too, has not been in a hurry to tackle the issue of liberty. He ordered in January that evidence from the court handling the BK case should be transferred to Aheri for the framing of charges. The trial will begin thereafter. Given that Gadling has already spent more than seven years in incarceration in the Surajgarh case, for which the blame partly lies with the Supreme Court, might he not have been enlarged on bail?

In the end, reflect on this scene from 2018: five days after Gadling was arrested, he was rushed from police custody in Pune to Sassoon hospital with chest pain. He underwent angiography. When Minal visited Gadling, she found him handcuffed to the hospital cot. Could a man having undergone a heart procedure escape? Minal’s description of this heart-rending moment reminded me of the title of London-based academic Subir Sinha’s conference paper, “Justice must not only be denied, it must be seen to be denied.” The denial of justice must be seen by all of us so that we refrain from challenging the state.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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