Mangaluru: After their prolonged incarceration and subsequent release on bail, the National Investigating Agency is eager to send the rights defenders held in the Elgar Parishad case back to jail. The agency (NIA) had, last month, moved an application seeking cancellation of the bail of Telugu poet-activist Varavara Rao and lawyer-academic Sudha Bharadwaj. On June 10, Wednesday, the agency moved a fresh application seeking cancellation of the bails of two more activists, Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira.The move was triggered by the ongoing controversy in the Mumbai Press Club where the defendants had informally met a few journalists, an act that the central agency claims violates their bail conditions.In the fresh set of ‘cancellation of bail’ applications, the agency has once again invoked the same grounds – that the accused persons, Gonsalves and Ferreira, are barred from being in touch with anyone implicated in this or similar cases. While the Supreme Court granted bail to Gonsalves and Ferreira in July 2023, the bail conditions were decided by the special NIA court in Mumbai. Identical grounds were argued in the earlier set of bail cancellation applications filed in the case of Rao and Bharadwaj. The agency has alleged that the meeting at the Press Club, held on January 19, was organised to propagate the ideology of the banned CPI (Maoist) organisation. The NIA has relied on their phone call records, phone locations and the internal report of the Mumbai Press Club to build a case for cancellation of bail against of the defendants in the Elgar Parishad case.The case next comes up for hearing on June 19. All the accused in the case who have got bail have been visiting the court regularly for hearings. Although bail conditions bar them from meeting each other, it is not a practical possibility considering they are all supposed to assemble in the court every fortnight for court dates, and as and when applications are moved in the case. The Mumbai Press Club controversy stems from an informal get-together on January 19 of a few accused in the Elgar Parishad case at the club. The club hauled up three senior journalists – Gurbir Singh, Bernard D’Mello, and Shrikant Modak – for arranging the meeting and suspended their membership for six years.Singh moved the Mumbai City Civil Court and secured an interim order in his favour, which not only restored his membership but also allowed him to contest the club’s elections. The court, in the interim order, observed that “prima facie the action appeared to be only with an intent to prevent him from contesting the elections of the club”. This tussle between the Club’s members, however, has a real bearing on the lives of activists and human rights defenders who have suffered prolonged incarceration, even though the trial is nowhere in sight. Several independent human rights organisations and digital experts have raised questions over the veracity of the digital evidence over which the Elgar Parishad case was built in 2018.In 2021, as part of a collaborative investigative series published by The Wire, it was found that several of the activists named in the case were also possible victims of the use of the Pegasus malware. Similar reports corroborating The Wire’s findings were released by different independent labs.