When the state turns rogue even protests dry up, Salutes & Apologies Professor Saibaba!

sabrang — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 09:23:54 +0000

There was a sense of numbing grief as the news flashed before us around 9.32 p.m. Saturday, October 12, 2024 that this gentle, steely giant of a man, Professor GN Saibaba had died. Accompanying this, for me at least was a sense of acute helplessness, burning anger and bitter realisation. Helplessness because there is only so much that even extraordinarily committed individuals and organisations can do when even independent wings of the state lare now tainted with blood and vengeance, anger arising out of the helplessness that moral wrongdoing is now the norm. Bitter realisation that how this corrosive state of 10-10.5 years of state of affairs has fractured alliances and voices who once at least rose in some sort of chaotic unison.

Salutes and Apologies Vasanta ji and Professor GN Saibaba!

The last we met and briefly held hands was outside AKG Bhavan, Delhi where he, with his usual gentle resolve had been wheeled by dear wife, Vasanta to pay tribute to Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the CPI-M. That was September 14, 2024, Sita had left us two days before, exactly a month before Saibaba did, on September 12, 2024. On Saturday, October 12, 2024, the 54 year old professor of English died of “complications following a gall bladder surgery at one of Hyderabad’s known hospitals.”

Immediately, I had to say something publicly, react. “Who answers for this life lost, unaccountability & callousness? #GNSaibaba We owe you….” is what I said on X.

Who answers for this life lost, unaccoutability & callousness? #GNSaibaba We owe you…. pic.twitter.com/6iI7j99yan

— Teesta Setalvad (@TeestaSetalvad) October 12, 2024

Professor GN Saubaba had stubbornly refused to die despite every effort by the brute Nagpur jail authorities, on instructions of the political executive, to ensure every indignity heeped on this physically frail and handicapped man. After being accused and convicted of all kinds of manipulated charges including under the draconian anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and convicted to life imprisonment on March 7, 2017 he was first acquitted on October 14, 2022 by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, only for a superior court to ensure further jail term. Saibaba’s poem penned at the time was and is a source of sorrowful inspiration. On August 5, 2023, the Bombay high court judge Justice Rohit B Deo (former Advocate General, Maharashtra from 2016 to 2017) — who had acquitted Professor GN Saibaba—resigned, a full two years a four months before he was due to retire on December 4, 2025. Though citing personal reasons to be the cause, in his statement before the court while he made farewell remarks in open court, he did say, “I can’t work against my self-respect.” After the Supreme Court’s “interventions” at this stage, the Bombay high court again acquitted Saibaba and others on March 5, 2024, observing that holding a trial under UAPA without adhering to procedural requirements would amount to a “failure to justice”. Professor Saibaba’s wife Vasanta Kumari who valiantly stood by him through all these multiple violations of the Constitution and law had, with him, a beaming smile, when he finally was wheeled out free from the Nagpur Central Jail on March 7, 2024.

Saibaba’s death after a critical surgery at the age of 54 raises questions for which there will be, likely no answers. A former professor of the Department of English, University of Delhi and a prominent figure in the struggle for democratic rights and the defence of the marginalised, Prof. Saibaba, was 90 percent disabled and wheelchair-bound. What had he been accused of, charges that he was, after a bitter ten long years, acquitted? Of being “a member of the banned Maoist party on flimsy grounds of having some Maoist literature in his house.” There was no other evidence and yet, he had been incarcerated eight and a half years ago and had been kept in conditions which utterly disregarded his physical condition and resulted in continuing deterioration of his health. Little regard was paid to his need for proper medical attention. Finally, almost too late, the Maharashtra High Court acquitted him of all charges and he was discharged recently. However, his condition could not take the stress of gall bladder surgery and he passed away due to haemorrhage and cardiac arrest. Saibaba had said on release from Nagpur jail on March 6, “When I went to prison, I had no ailment other than my disability. Now, my heart is 55% functional…live, gallbladder and pancreas have also been affected. My right hand is partially functional. My doctor says I need multiple surgeries.”

Who will pay for this state-driven negligence?

In any civilised society –and electoral democracies mandated by the sovereign will of the people certainly claim that label—there should be an independent inquiry into such a death, at the very least. So that those guilty jailors and Superintendents of Nagpur prison face rebuke, real punishment. And we as citizens with the sovereign authority are informed of who exactly in the executive ordered such treatment. Prof. Saibaba’s death has therefore also been called nothing short of an institutional murder as was Father Stan Swamy’s on July 5, 2021. On July 5, 2021 Stan Swamy had died of cardiac arrest, complications from COVID-19, Parkinson’s, also a victim of dismal and unaccountable Taloja jail prison conditions.

The Indian state, and judiciary, which failed not only to protect his fundamental right to a dignified life, actually also subjected him to the most cruel and inhuman conditions of incarceration, denying him even the basic medical attention.

His own words best express both his life, treatment in jail and death.

Saibaba’s poem from jail in 2017

When I refused to die
my chains were loosened
I came out
Into the vast meadows
Smiling at the leaves of grass
My smile caused intolerance in them
I was shackled again
Again, when I refused to die
tired of my life
my captors released me
I walked out
into the lush green valleys under the rising sun
smiling at the tossing blades of grass
Infuriated by my undying smile
They captured me again
I still stubbornly refuse to die
The sad thing is that
They don’t know how to make me die
Because I love so much
The sounds of growing grass

November 2017. (Remembering October 1917)

G N Saibaba, life convict, Anda Cell, Nagpur Jail

What does all of this, in any real sense mean? As we pen our thoughts and tributes to this extraordinary man, whom the Delhi University refused to re-instate as professor even after his acquittal, first we must recall that though Professor G N Saibaba died a free man, acquitted of all charges, he could not savour the sounds of freedom for even a year.

Here was a man 90 % physically challenged who survived solitary confinement –three stretches at a time—for a total of eight and a half years. He was deprived of his essential mode of mobility, the wheelchair in the Nagpur’s Central Jail, a wheelchair that he had been dependant on since childhood. Medicines essential to his treatment for 19 ailments were denied him as was a simple bland diet and other medical treatment. This despite the fact that when he was arrested for the second time, in December 2015, on orders of the Gadchiroli sessions court, Professor Saibaba was due for pancreatic surgery and a delay would lead to infection, which his doctors had warned.

Confined to solitary confinement, the Anda Cell (reserved for the most dangerous persons!), itself an acknowledged form of mental torture, he was in jail in Nagpur, a city in Maharashtra with hot summers and cold, cold winters. Even when sharp pains seared his body in winter, jail authorities refused to allow him warm clothes sent by his family. In a letter to his wife, A S Vasanta Kumari, from prison in November 2017, eight months after having been convicted for life under the anti-terrorist act UAPA, he had baldly said, “I am living like an animal.” The callous unaccountability by the jail authorities continued until the very end leading to an open letter, in December 2020 by his lawyer to the jail authorities saying that ‘Saibaba’s future was in his hands.’

Among all the questions that should bother our Courts is this one, “How long is too long a period of incarceration as an under trial for a court to conclude the right of speedy trial is defeated?” It was the Delhi High Court in Mohamed Hakim v. State (NCT of Delhi) 2021 SCC OnLine Del 4623, who had thus queried, though that was in the context of grant of bail for an undertrial prisoner. As India today ignominiously boasts of over 4, 00,000 under trials –several thousand of which have served terms way beyond the punitive terms they are charged with, Saibaba’s death reminds us of a state’s complete collapse. Apart from Saibaba, there are other political prisoners, Delhi Riots cases 2020 (Umar Khalid we know and speak of often, Gulfishan Faitima less so), Orissa, Chhattisgarh that point a finger at us and the higher judiciary. Is it not about time that High Court and Supreme Court Judges, step out of their courts and chambers and visit the Jails in their jurisdiction? Meet and speak to under trials and convicted, interrogate and examine why some of their Orders on Bail and Release are simply not implemented on the ground.

More of such ruminations, point by point, later. This one is about Professor GN Saibaba. So I will end this guilt-filled remembrance with the poem tweeted by fellow journalist, Saubaba, today, October 15.

When you remove Saibaba’s eyes,

Please add a touch of gentleness,

For in them lie traces of the world he dreamt of,

That might unfold within someone else.

Please extract his heart with utmost skill,

For in that tenacious heart that denied death

In the fascist Manuvadi regime’s prison,

You may find the roots of tender compassion

For the Adivasis and the oppressed masses.

In constant captivity, grappling with illness,

He stood firm for his beliefs.

Please check, perhaps, those polio-stricken legs