G.N. Saibaba’s death is an injustice

Saibaba breathed his last at 8.36 pm on 12 October. His heart had stopped functioning and doctors were trying desperately to revive him. We all knew that it was not to be. He was on the ventilator for the last 24 hours. Vasantha, his wife, told me that his kidneys had stopped functioning. I did not know how to give her hope. She is a realist and must have known what was coming. It happened finally.

Saibaba was 57 years old. He died due to complications arising after the removal of gallstones. Gallstones and surgery to remove them are common. My doctor friends told me that there was only a 1 per cent chance of it going wrong, leading to death. But it can happen. Even a simple surgery can go wrong and a person can die. We are left with regret but we accept it. Unfortunately, this is what happened with Saibaba. But why are we unable to accept that it was a death due to complications arising from surgery? Why do we feel that Saibaba’s death is not a death but a murder? A murder for which the state and the judiciary must take responsibility?

We feel that Saibaba’s death is an injustice. After facing injustice at the hands of the state and the judiciary, Saibaba got freedom by chance and his free life lasted only seven months. The shock caused by this death is due to the feeling of this double injustice. First, he was put in jail for more than eight years on phoney charges and then he was not allowed to enjoy his hard-earned freedom.

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Saibaba was sentenced to life imprisonment under UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) on charges of affiliation with the Maoist party, his alleged role in terrorist activities, etc. After his arrest in 2014, he remained in jail for about eight years. In 2022, a bench of the Bombay High Court found that the basis on which all the allegations were made on Saibaba was too hollow to prosecute him. The basis of the allegation was the recovery of the documents by the police from his house. With the help of these documents, the police sought to prove that Saibaba was associated with the Maoists and he played a role in its terrorist actions.

The court considered this allegation and this evidence sufficient to sentence him to life imprisonment. After Saibaba had spent more than six years in jail, the Bombay High Court found that the entire process of recovery of evidence was flawed and no punishment could be given on that basis. Neither Saibaba nor any other educated person was present at the time of the seizure. The police made an illiterate person a witness and prepared the Panchnama (a document that records the details of a crime scene). The court said that this cannot be considered as evidence to keep the case going and that such serious allegations cannot be made through such a weak procedure.

What was the real crime of Saibaba? He constantly raised his voice for the human rights of the weak, the oppressed and the wronged by the system. Is this not a crime in the India we live in today? Is it not a crime to believe that the freedom of some people is not real freedom? That everyone should have it? That was the crime Saibaba was guilty of, and he paid for it.

The Bombay court had corrected the injustice of the lower court but the same day the Supreme Court rushed to stay that order. This was extraordinary. It is generally believed that the courts will work in favour of individual freedom and that even a day of loss of personal freedom should not be tolerated. But here it was reversed. The freedom that Saibaba had got was immediately taken away by the Supreme Court. Several months later the Supreme Court asked another bench of the Bombay High Court to review the decision. That bench not only found the process of investigation and evidence collection to be wrong, but dismissed the case on merits. It made it possible for Saibaba to come out of Nagpur jail on 7 March, 2024.

I heard Saibaba in the first public meeting held after his release in Delhi. While narrating his experiences in jail, he broke down while expressing the pain of not being able to meet his mother before her death. Later, he told the media how the infamous Anda cell of Nagpur jail had completely broken him. Earlier, he had a disability due to polio in childhood. He suffered from 90 per cent disability. The inhuman life in jail inflicted him with various diseases and his body became completely hollow. He was also infected with Covid and it created other physical complications.

As soon as he was jailed, Ramlal Anand College terminated his service. He was teaching English there. His wife Vasantha and daughter Manjeera faced this difficult situation with extraordinary patience and courage. Meanwhile, Manjeera completed her studies. We found Vasantha present everywhere on any issue related to human rights. She never distanced herself from such issues. Meanwhile, she and his lawyer kept on appealing the courts for the release of Saibaba with great perseverance. After all, who better than her knew that Saibaba had been wronged by the Indian state and the court? That everything they said was false.

Also Read | G.N. Saibaba reveals torture and injustice during 10-year imprisonment

There was a danger that we might forget Saibaba in the midst of one injustice after another this country was bombarded with. Our colleague, Hany Babu, made it his mission to campaign for the release of Saibaba. What he was doing was dangerous but we saw him calmly reminding the world that a wrong had been committed and Saibaba had to be a free man. Finally, Hany Babu was punished for seeking justice. He too was arrested as an accused in the conspiracy of Bhima Koregaon violence. He has been in jail for the last four years. While fighting for the freedom of Saibaba he was robbed of his own freedom by the state.

When Saibaba came out of jail on March 7, the first thought that came to my mind was of Hany Babu. What an irony it was that Hany Babu, who fought for so many years for Saibaba’s freedom, was not there to welcome Saibaba to a free world. He himself was in jail at that moment, having lost his freedom. The story of Saibaba and Hany Babu is the story of the broken promise of Indian democracy. But it is also the story of the democratic courage of a common man.

Pact of blood

After Saibaba’s release, I went to meet him at his house in Vasant Kunj. Saibaba welcomed me in his wheelchair with a slightly restrained smile. I met him again at his house with Kavita Srivastava [National President, PUCL India ] and Father Cedric Prakash. We could see how overjoyed Vasantha and Manjeera were.

Saibaba wanted work. He did not want to depend on the support from friends. We were thinking of ways, legal and social, to persuade his college that after his acquittal and release, it should take him back. It is sad that the Delhi University Teachers’ Association did not think it necessary to stand up for a colleague who was cleared by the courts. It tells us about the loss of professional collegiality, about how divided we have become on political lines and lost all sense of professional solidarity.

Then Saibaba presided over the Neelabh Mishra Memorial Lecture in June. Vrinda Grover who delivered this lecture spoke about political prisoners. Saibaba was one.

We kept in contact through the phone. He was worried about his job. But he did not want any charity. I kept wondering whether anyone in today’s India has the courage to give work to Saibaba. Why did not any institution come forward to offer him a job? Why? Are we such a cowardly country?

Then comes a point when there remains no need to do all this. A simple surgery has brought death to Saibaba. A man who survived the inhuman Anda cell of the Nagpur jail, who came out of the jail holding life in his teeth, was felled by nature. But why are we unable to accept it as death? Have we gone mad to call it a murder? Shouldn’t the Indian state and the Supreme Court need to think about our state of hallucination? Should not it answer this question of why people immediately called this death a murder?

Saibaba wanted to live. Even when it looked impossible to breathe free air, when he was in jail hopeless. This is what he wrote as a poetic response to Vasantha on 25 July, 2018:

Mortality is truth, as Saibaba wrote, “even the earth dies” but as he wished “there must be many many earths.” So death struck our Saibaba but his pact of love with beauty lives; his pact of blood with his people still lives.

Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University and writes literary and cultural criticism.