“While searching Manoranjan’s emails, we found a travel memoir in one of the folders which (he) probably forgot to delete as he had deleted most of the recent years’ data and mail exchanges. The memoir is about his travels from Chennai to Ladakh on a motorcycle. It mirrors the famous ‘Motorcycle Diaries’ penned by Che Guevara,” sources said, citing the chargesheet.

“This memoir and its contents are significant pointers towards the deviant motivations and his centrality in the larger conspiracy,” the chargesheet claims, according to sources.

According to police, Manoranjan allegedly wrote in the memoirs about a Chinese national, “Li Rong”, who traveled with him during the trip from Hyderabad to Delhi.

“…Manoranjan admitted that Li Rong was known to him and they had first met in a gym in Mysuru in 2011. He also disclosed that his travel to Ladakh in 2011 was for meeting one Tibetan activist, but his meeting was unfruitful. One of his associates, with whom he met in gym, and currently working with the Bureau of Immigration, was called for questioning and he claimed that Manoranjan had inquired about the security apparatus of Parliament. The Chinese national left India for China in 2016, and no further movement… could be found,” police have claimed in their chargesheet, sources said.

Referring to the chargesheet, sources said Manoranjan allegedly “proposed his plan to the other accused, asking to create chaos and disruption in the Parliament which will help them gain media attention”.

Running into over 1,000 pages, the chargesheet was filed by the Counter-Intelligence Unit of the Delhi Police against the six accused in the case. Apart from Manoranjan, they include Sagar Sharma, Anmol Shinde, Lalit Jha, Mahesh Kumawat and Neelam Ranoliya.

While Manoranjan and Sharma were arrested for jumping into the Lok Sabha hall of the new Parliament House from the visitors’ gallery and opening smoke cans on December 13, 2023, Ranoliya and Shinde were held for opening smoke canisters outside the building.

Apart from being listed as a key player in the incident, Jha has also been accused of destroying evidence of the alleged conspiracy. According to police, Kumawat allegedly contacted Jha and others via a Facebook group named ‘Bhagat Singh Fan Page’.

The incident, which took place hours after lawmakers had paid tribute to those who died on this day in 2001 during the terror attack on the old Parliament building, triggered a political firestorm.

Police in Karnataka, from where Manoranjan hails, later found that he accessed the visitors’ gallery with a pass allegedly obtained from the office of the then Mysuru-Kodagu MP Pratap Simha.

The Indian Express reported that Manoranjan, 35, was an engineering graduate who had worked at an IT firm in Bengaluru before deciding to help his father with farming near their home in Mysuru.

To convince the other accused, Manoranjan “made them watch a video of an incident that had taken place in the Parliament of Kosovo in 2018, where some chemical smoke was used to disrupt the proceedings, with the brief that this incident had overturned the government there. ”, sources said, citing the charge sheet.

On March 21, 2018, the Associated Press reported that Kosovo opposition lawmakers used tear gas three times to disrupt a parliamentary vote on a border demarcation deal with Montenegro. However, lawmakers were able to go through with the vote and approved the border deal, the report said.

According to sources, the chargesheet claims the questioning of Manoranjan revealed that “after undertaking travels across the country”, he started “thinking of ways and means to establish his own organization, which would grow into his own government where he would be holding a position akin to a King”.

“This was Manoranjan’s idea of ​​a different form of government, totally dissociated with the constitutionally ordained Indian democratic system,” the chargesheet states, sources said.

“…He decided to target the very symbol of Indian democracy; the Parliament and towards this goal, he started scouting for people on social media, who could become his loyalists and undertake the venture of creating terror in the temple of Indian democracy. He started searching… on social media for persons who were espousing and advocating various social and nationalistic causes, with special care to select those who hailed from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and lacked formal education,” the chargesheet states, according to sources.

Manoranjan “visualised that the terror act that he was propagating would lead to a minor case only but the rewards that the incident would bring (were) far more consequential than some petty criminal proceedings,” the chargesheet states, sources said.

Last week, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena accorded prosecution sanction against the accused under the stringent UAPA. Police are expected to file a supplementary charge sheet later this month.