We must now think of Saibaba as someone who could not finish telling us his story. We must have imaginary conversations with him, so that we can hear him. We gasped for Father Stan Swamy, for Pandu Narote, to commune with them. Now, we are gasping for Saibaba, who has been snuffed out of our lives so suddenly.
A man lives to tell his tale. And here the tale is so drastic, so singular and yet of such universal significance. How can we cope with the loss of a man who had only just started to tell us this tale?
I want to ask him: Dear Sai, how do we survive this story, left untold? Your story would have been our story, guiding us along on our path.
The course of his life overshadowed his intentions and what he willed. Having spent several years as someone convicted for life, the last seven months after his release as a free man were still consumed by a kind of formal exchange of pleasantries. We were still thinking how to really talk about what he went through. We were yet to get there, the real conversations were yet to take place. He was just beginning to find his inner poise in this world.
Sai, after his decade-long incarceration, was once again discovering life and his passions. It feels like we have lost him utterly young. He had made it past so much only to fail in a tiny ordeal. His loss leaves us utterly devastated. There is a gaping hole in our lives now. It is as though our own rise or fall is at stake, that is how acutely we feel this moment.
They say that a man’s life is the chronicle of his times. But Saibaba’s life is not just a chronicle of his times, it is also a chronicle of that which the times refused to chronicle. With Sai, the usual phrases must be turned on their head.
We were yet to discover the many ways his life would shine the light on what so many refuse to acknowledge or even notice. In fact, even the actual story of his release, his court battle, is yet to appear in the public domain because there are so many layers behind what went on.
Just the story of the twists and turns of his life takes us to hidden corners and crevices, the darkest corners of the dazzlingly well-lit spectacle this world hides securely.
But forget for a moment, the pain and suffering inflicted upon him.
Think of how Saibaba’s court case ended up inducing an instance of self-cannibalism within the establishment, splitting the Indian judiciary right in the middle. One such moment was the punishment meted out to Justice Rohit B. Deo of the Bombay high court for giving bail to Saibaba. The Judiciary punished one of its own. This punishment, decided by a collegium comprising no less than the Chief Justice of India (CJI) D.Y. Chandrachud, was based on shadowy ‘intelligence inputs’ received by the court, revealing the many hidden nexuses of power, not least of the higher courts.
Saibaba’s life cuts open the curated masks of power. His life is the thread which ties together and yanks out the inner recesses of entrenched power. How, for instance, ‘the basic structure doctrine’ of the Constitution is consistent with Operation Green Hunt and Operation Kagar which devastated Adivasi lives on a mass scale.
There are metaphors here, as we talk about the dead. And yet, in Sai’s life everything is a metaphor but again not just that. For the court of law so often turns them into something legalistic.
The courts singled out his brain. He is ‘the brain’, the court pronounced. The court has, as is evident, no interest in taking note of the great Adivasi struggle and resistance against big capital raging in central India. So they wanted to find a scapegoat, an instigator, a conspirator, a mastermind. To be regarded as the mastermind of “a conspiracy against the nation” – is that not the only way one can be a great man today?
The fact that the country found such a figure – and that, thanks to Saibaba, such a figure was indeed available – it is within these highly mediated, convoluted, and almost perverse logics that we must identify and locate Sai’s greatness.
We all heard the hushed voices – no, let’s avoid him, don’t mingle with him, this will bring trouble. I remember those voices around me. Clearly, he wasn’t everyone’s man.
But now, do you want to understand the opposite of “divisive”? It doesn’t always have a negative connotation. “Divisive” can also mean what Mao called “One Divides into Two.” It can mean separating the husk from the grain, a dialectical differentiation to capture what is often avoided for reasons of state or expediency. Saibaba’s life – his political journey, as it unfolded, perhaps even despite himself – exemplifies this hidden wisdom in being “sectarian” or “divisive.”
Sai’s death feels like the kind of martyrdom that inspires people to move forward and rise even higher, rather than to stagnate and wallow in loss and sorrow. I felt like this when Mallojula Koteswara Rao, popularly known as Kishenji, was killed in 2011.
However, with Sai’s loss, I also feel something else that is eating me from within. I feel heavy, drawn towards a wallowing, melancholic state of mind. I feel paralysed. Because we were right there, we were just beginning to celebrate his freedom. He was just letting us back into his life, enriched with all the pain and suffering he had endured. And then he was taken away.
And yet, I know that Sai’s death is unlike any other – a perfect death for the courts, corporate capital, and the ruling dispensation, who, to say the least, wanted him brain dead. A dream come true for Indian democracy, so it can feel secure and robust. Such an eerily perfect fit between wishful thinking and reality.
Saroj Giri teaches Politics in University of Delhi and is part of the Forum Against Corporatization and Militarisation (FACAM).
