A little over ten years ago, a momentous event took place, the horrifying significance of which has only now become tragically clear.
On the afternoon of May 9, 2014, G.N. Saibaba, assistant professor with the Department of English at Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College, was abducted by the Gadchiroli police of Maharashtra with the full cooperation of the Delhi police on his way back home from his examination duties.
He was accused and found guilty of a number of charges under the IPC and the UAPA, mostly around the preposterous idea of ‘waging war on the Indian state’. For the next ten years, Saibaba was held at the Nagpur central jail, much of this time in solitary confinement in an inhuman space called an ‘anda cell’.
What is particularly preposterous about this particular case is not only that Saibaba was one of the most respected teachers in his college and highly regarded inside and outside the university as a committed academic and activist; it is that he was completely wheelchair-bound and suffering from various nervous and other disorders.
In an appeal for intervention to the United Nations, the ‘Committee for the Defence and Release of Dr Saibaba’ noted that he was
“90% disabled, from post-polio paralysis of the legs and is completely wheelchair bound … He cannot sit without firm back support, as his legs are wasted. He also suffers from partial immobility of the upper arms and painful swelling of the ligaments. Consequently, Dr Saibaba constantly requires the assistance of a personal assistant to wheel him around … He also suffers from a cardiac condition, hypertension, and chronic and severe spinal pain.”
There was repeated and continuous international concern expressed (albeit on deaf years) for the flagrant violation of Saibaba’s rights, as well as for the blatant abuse of state power evident in the brutal manner in which he was attacked, arrested and kept confined.
For ten years, the Indian state maintained Saibaba in a condition of inhumanity amounting to continuous torture, a period during which he was callously denied anything more than the most basic and superficial treatment for his rapidly deteriorating medical condition; denied meetings with his family; and for the most part, even denied the right to a fair trial, at the level of the lower courts.
The Indian prison system did everything in its power to break him, but he remained strong, unbending. Decades of battling every form of deprivation and injustice, as well of overcoming the disadvantages posed by his severe disability, made sure that he would not succumb to the same injustices just because they were now being committed on him in jail.
When he was allowed out on bail for a brief few months, during these ten years, Saibaba told a few of us how he had been repeatedly informed by various personnel of the Indian police and intelligence services that they had nothing on him legally, and that they knew that he knew that they had nothing on him. So they offered to let him go, if only he would promise never to take up political activism again.
Also read | Saibaba Acquittal: From Lack of Sanction to Dodgy Evidence, High Court Judgment Tears Into State’s Case
His refusal to do so, on sheer principle, galled them even more, and led to even greater cruelty being committed on him. On several occasions, after his bail was suddenly revoked and he was thrown back in jail, Saibaba had to be hospitalised in near critical condition for various medical issues that just kept getting worse.
Eventually, he lost the use of his left arm completely because of the violence he had experienced at the hands of law enforcement personnel during his arrest and later, making it almost impossible to even manage his wheelchair by himself.
But Saibaba remained unbending, even as his body broke down under the abuse and torture.
When Saibaba was eventually found innocent and released by a division bench of the Bombay high court earlier this year, his friends and family were overjoyed to receive him back. But that joy was short-lived. Within a few months, Saibaba’s spirit succumbed to his broken body, and he passed away on the night of October 12.
Saibaba was certainly not the first to be arrested under the UAPA on the grounds of having links with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). But Saibaba was perhaps the most visible and public of those arrested in this manner.
In some senses, his arrest, conviction and treatment in prison was the Indian state’s way of testing the extent it could go to, in its repression of dissent and in its intensifying assault on intellectuals, activists and students who spoke up against its injustices and tyrannies.
That a person like Saibaba could remain in jail for ten years was for the Indian state a sign that it could get away with blatant violence and abuse of power, even on a highly regarded and severely disabled person – if it could frame that violence and abuse in just the ‘right’ way – i.e., as committed in the name of the security of the nation.
And therein lies the horrifying significance of Saibaba’s arrest. Over the last ten years, the state has used that same framework of violence and abuse against a steadily increasing number of social, political and cultural activists. Activists working for Dalits, tribals and minorities in particular have been arrested in large numbers, and many of them also convicted, under the same legal provisions as Saibaba. And some, like Father Stan Swamy and Pandu Narote, died as a consequence, like Saibaba.
We failed to save Saibaba in time: how many more of such ‘political prisoners’ shall we allow to die, because they spoke and lived and honoured their politics unflinchingly?
Saibaba’s death can serve as a sign to be cautious about speaking up, about dissenting, about resisting injustice – to become silent and compliant. Or it can remind us of the consequence of silence and inaction, in the face of injustice, especially when it is committed by the state itself.
Goodbye, my friend. Rest in power. Your death will not pass silently into the night.
Karen Gabriel, St Stephen’s College, Delhi University and Prem Kumar Vijayan, Hindu College, Delhi University.