“I have lived all my conscious life on the campuses of learning and teaching in search of knowledge, love and freedom. In the course of this search, I learnt that freedom for a few was no freedom.”
– G.N. Saibaba, from Why Do You Fear My Way So Much? Poems and Letters from Prison
The untimely death of G.N. Saibaba (fondly known as Sai among his friends and well-wishers) when he was about to start his life afresh after acquittal betrays the brutality and inhumanity that the state had meted out to him during his long incarceration. First as an undertrial and later as a convicted prisoner. When he was finally acquitted of all charges by the Nagpur Bench of the high court of Bombay – despite all attempts of the Indian state to prolong his incarceration by hook or crook – it was a moment of victory for the democratic rights movement and all those who shared the dream of Sai: of a society free of all forms of exploitation, oppression and discrimination.
Sai could have lived longer. Yet the short but eventful life of this 57-year-old activist, academic, public intellectual, organiser, and leader of peoples movements is quite extraordinary for the expanse of the ideology and politics that enlivened his commitment tempered by the sheer will power and ambition emanating from his persona against all odds and adversities.
Having suffered from post-polio paralysis that rendered him 90% disabled from early childhood, Sai had to endure acute economic hardships striving hard to achieve education that would open up horizons to a new world. His parents, though economically poor, were pillars of great moral courage and character. His early school education at his native village, the picturesque Amalapuram in coastal Andhra, at an institution run by progressive Christian missionaries, had lit the fire of his thirst for knowledge.
As a passionate student of literature, especially in Telugu and English, Sai had internalised the raging debates that defined the literary firmament in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh in the 1970s and 80s.
Literary production in Telugu was undergoing a sea change with debates about the role of art and literature in society. The questions that it raised were not an exclusive concern among the literati. In fact this debate had captured the imagination of the radical/revolutionary student’s movement in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. The salient point that deeply influenced Sai was that serious art and literary production cannot escape the social reality it inhabits/is situated in. It is in the dissection and representation of concrete social reality, as it is in art and literary production, that universal values that are generated and celebrated. By showing the reality as it is, with all its nuances, art and literary production should conscientise the reader about the objective and subjective conditions that define their being. The progressive/revolutionary literary movement was the warp and weft of these debates that deeply influenced the world views of the student of English literature. Sai was an active participant of the Revolutionary Writers Association (VIRASAM) arguing for a literary language that authentically represented the social location of the protagonists in the literary artefact.
Also read: In What Language, Under Total Surveillance, Does Truth Speak to a Tormented People?
The same sensibility remained with Sai till his last breath as a scholar, passionate teacher, public intellectual, litigant for the most oppressed/ discriminated, an organiser of people’s movements, a champion of democratic rights and civil liberties, and as an ideologue who espoused the cause of the most oppressed, exploited and discriminated.
Sai moved to Delhi with his life partner and activist Vasanta and daughter Manjeera where he took up a job as Assistant Professor in English Literature at Ramlal Anand College, Delhi University, while pursuing his Ph.D.
If the young differently-abled boy was carried by his daily-wager labourer mother to school at native Amalapuram everyday, in Delhi, the activist academic used to navigate unfriendly and inaccessible buildings with feet padded with rubber slippers. Later, when he managed to buy a wheelchair, those spaces that were still inaccessible in many of the buildings were reached with the help of his comrades who used to carry him.
In Delhi, Saibaba became actively involved in people’s movements. There was not a single issue that was not of immediate concern for him. With a calm and friendly disposition, he was easily accessible to one and all. Sai was a natural glue which brought together various people’s movements under a common agenda to fight unitedly for the people’s cause.
The early noughts were also a critical moment – post 9/11. This saw the ascendance of the politics of “war against terror” dovetailing the anger and protests of vast sections of the people aggrieved of increasing strife and misery due to the policies of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG). “War against terror” was a potent tool for the state to criminalise protests and people’s movements under the garb of national security and national interest. The increasing onslaught on the lives and livelihoods of people who witnessed massive land acquisition, opening up verdant forests and hills for mining resulting in the three dreaded Ds –Displacement, Destruction and Death. Draconian laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and Public Safety Act (PSA) were brought in to suppress the protests of Adivasis in Central and Eastern India, fighting for their jal, jungle, and zameen.
Likewise for people who were protesting against acquisition of their land in West Bengal, coastal Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. These were also the times of rising tide of the politics of Hindutva which found a fertile soil to breed in a highly securitised state armed with draconian laws. Prisons were getting inundated with Adivasis, Muslims and Dalits – those who were largely affected by the policies of LPG – along with a sizeable section of the OBCs and those targeted for their political positions.
Also read: Five Years of Incarceration – and the Audacity of Hope
Saibaba took active initiative in constituting the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP) alongside a host of civil libertarians, intellectuals, human rights lawyers, academics, students campaigning for and offering legal defence to ensure the release of people who were targeted for their political beliefs/activities to better the lives and livelihoods of the most exploited and oppressed; those who belonged to the oppressed minorities such as Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims – the national minorities.
Sai played a key role as one of the founding members of the Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vibas Andolan (VVJVA) alongside the late Dr. B.D. Sharma and the late Father Stan Swamy to bring a wide range of people’s movements against displacement throughout the length and breadth of the country in a single platform. VVJVA’s historic vision document, called the Ranchi Declaration, brought forth a sharp relief to the pro-big capital, pro-monopoly, anti-people nature of the model of development forced by the Indian state on the peoples of the subcontinent. Such a model can only result in a Displacement, Destruction and Death that is socially, culturally and ecologically irreversible. As an alternative, the Ranchi Declaration propounded a People’s Model of Development that was equitable and ecologically sustainable, keeping the interests of the people at the centre.
But the Indian state was going ahead with its policies, violating the constitutional guarantees in scheduled areas as well as the PESA Act, entering into more than 100 MoUs (Memoranda of Understanding) with various multinational corporations for mining in the verdant forests in Central and Eastern India without the consent of the gram sabhas (of mostly Adivasis) of these regions. This was accompanied by heavy militarisation with the mushrooming of paramilitary camps in almost all these regions where the proposed MoUs were supposed to take off ostensibly to fight the Maoists. After J&K, Central and Eastern India had become the most militarised regions in the world. Saibaba alongside late Dr. B.D. Sharma, prominent writer Arundhati Roy, late professor S.A.R. Geelani and others had embarked on a countrywide and international campaign against the imminent danger to the lives and livelihoods of Adivasis among the poorest of the poor in the country. The genocidal dimension of this campaign was evident from the very name given to it – Operation Green Hunt (OGH) – a term used by the white colonisers in their extermination campaign of the native population in the Americas. It was this campaign that received international opprobrium to the Indian state for policies that threatened the very survival of the indigenous people of the subcontinent that further brought Sai in the cross-hairs of the Indian state.
Sai became the joint secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF) at its conference in 2012 at Hyderabad. RDF as a political platform had been critiquing the anti-people policies of the Indian state from an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal perspective, locating the problems confronting the people of the country to the very nature of the Indian state. RDF was later banned by the state.
Arundhati Roy dismantles the myth shrouding the word ‘voiceless’. She points out the lack of agency subsuming the word while attesting that there are only the silenced and silences. Sai, till his last breath, had fearlessly talked against the violence of being silenced, sharply critiquing the deliberate silences of those who turned a blind eye to the injustices that mark our society. Be it the personal – his unique bodily condition and society’s lack of sensibility to his specific situation, not to say the absence of a jurisprudence that is eyes and ears to the emergent needs and necessities of a differently abled – be it the larger question of comprehending freedom from the location of a Kashmiri Muslim, a Naga, a Manipuri, a Kuki, an Adivasi from Central and Eastern India, or from the vantage point of Dalits and the Muslims in India, all these concerns and questions were dear to Sai’s heart.
His anger and anguish from the confines of the anda cell succinctly articulate the politics of silencing and the silences we endure, as he writes:
“This has been my literary engagement. I count all the blank spaces between word and word, and between the lines…My friend, I am measuring silence because I am silenced.”
The wheelchair-user’s revolutionary’s legacy will live on…But only in our sagacity to live up to that legacy can we cherish our dreams of freedom of a society free from all forms of exploitation, oppression and discrimination.
Rona Wilson is a human rights defender, arrested along with other activists and academics in the Elgar Parishad case in 2018. Until his arrest, Wilson was public relations Secretary of the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP). As part of CRPP, Wilson extensively wrote and advocated against draconian legislations like the UAPA. He was later booked under the same law.