Four years after the first Elgar Parishad conclave, organised on December 31, 2017, during the bicentennial year of the historic Bhima-Koregaon battle, scores of people assembled at a hall in Pune’s Ganesh Kala Krida Manch on Saturday to pay their tributes once again.

On January 1 this year, which marked the 203rd anniversary of the historic Bhima-Koregaon battle, several senior political leaders, including Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and Union Minister Ramdas Athawale had visited the Jay Stambh memorial near Pune, built in memory of the Mahar-Dalit regiment of the East India Company that defeated the Peshwa Army in 1818. At the time, organisers of the Elgar Parishad conclave had been denied permission for an event by the Pune Police, due to detection of a new strain of the novel Coronavirus in the UK, and “the need to maintain law and order”.