No matter how grave a crime, or how big a gangster, they aren’t placed in the anda (egg-shaped) cell in Nagpur Central Prison. In the prison’s 90-year-old history, I think I was the only one who was put there — Dr GN Saibaba.
On a dull day in May 2014, a posse of policemen stopped a car to drag out a wheel-chair bound Literature professor. The events that followed hardly merit the term dull. What former Delhi University professor Dr GN Saibaba went through for 10 years since that May 9, till March this year, was aptly described by him as an agni pariksha (trial by fire), stoked by the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).
Saibaba was arrested, along with five others, under the draconian UAPA for alleged association with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). It didn’t matter that the evidence was flimsy — the prosecution named bananas, umbrellas, and newspapers as items used by Naxalites to identify each other and cited the presence of Naxalite literature as “proof of terrorist activity”.
The accused were charged under five sections of the UAPA, read alongside Section 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Each time the accused were acquitted by a lower court, the state appealed to the Supreme Court to ensure that the acquittal was stayed.
In March 2024, Saibaba was released along with four other co-accused (the fifth, Pandu Narote, died in prison). From then on until his death, Saibaba, who had been paralysed by polio, underwent several health crises.
He drew his last breath on Saturday, October 12, at Hyderabad’s Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) surrounded by doctors attempting to resuscitate his collapsing heart. At 8.36 pm, the professor was declared dead. He was 58.
His death warrants that we return to a simple yet essential question — who is GN Saibaba? Those unfamiliar with his case can easily dub him a ‘Naxal’. But for those who knew him and for the civil society and journalists who followed the case, many glorious splinters stand out and pierce. A staunch human rights activist of the Left, a beloved professor and comrade, and a doting husband form the parts that encapsulate his personhood.
A staunch human rights activist
For Saibaba, the dream of being a teacher and fighting for social causes was first realised during his Master’s at the University of Hyderabad (UoH). Up until then, his life had been confined to Amalapuram, a town in the former East Godavari district.
Their idealism led Saibaba and his wife Vasantha, who eventually joined him in Hyderabad, to participate in several mass movements as he pursued his PhD, and even after that. Saibaba toured several villages across India and until 2008 did so with crutches and the physical assistance of co-activists and villagers who showed him around.
In 1997, he participated in a seminar at the All India People’s Resistance Forum to shed light on how the achievements of post Independence India was nothing more than a “mere transfer of power”. He spoke at length about the need for agrarian movements like those in Chhattisgarh’s Dandakaranya, and in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh.
As the deputy secretary of the now banned Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), Saibaba spearheaded the All India People’s Resistance Forum against state repression in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar in 1999. A total of 50 solidarity programmes were held for this campaign in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Delhi, Assam, West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Gujarat.
While a part of the academia, Saibaba slammed any state offensive against Adivasis. His critique of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s Operation Green Hunt was scathing. A paramilitary offensive carried out in 2009, the operation made no distinction between arms-carrying militants and Adivasis residing in what was dubbed the red corridor, that is, certain districts between Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Saibaba criticised the burning of Adivasi huts, the murder of men at random, and rapes.
“I gathered enough evidence that suggested that the ruling class wanted access to [Adivasi] resources, no matter what. Operation Green Hunt was launched to kill, maim, and dislodge them,” Saibaba told The Hindu in 2012.
He played a key role in propelling the resistance launched by the RDF to stop investors from taking over tribal land for mining. He was also one among the many who pushed for the release of political prisoners like Afzal Guru. He protested in favour of SC, ST, and OBC students for the proper implementation of the reservation policy at Delhi University.
In 2021, Delhi University terminated his employment following the UAPA case against him. However, he was not reinstated after his acquittal.
Post his release, Saibaba wanted to work on education for the marginalised.
“If you look at the current state of the education system, you will see that government schools and colleges are being left for the SC, ST, and OBC students. All the private and central educational institutions are for the elite populations of the country. Dalit and Adivasi students don’t have access to these institutions, these liberal universities, and they are constantly discriminated against in these spaces. This needs to change. The Dalit and Adivasi students are being pushed into government schools. The shiny corporate universities and central universities are for the rich. As a result, students from the marginalised communities are suffering,” he told the Supreme Court Observer in March 2024.
In August 2024, Saibaba told media persons in Hyderabad that if there was one wish he wanted to fulfil, it was to teach again in a classroom. Sadly, that dream perished with him.
Assaulted by the State
For Saibaba’s supporters, it is beyond question that it was his decade-long incarceration that led to his deteriorating health and painful death. At a cultural event held in Hyderabad last month, Saibaba spoke about how the prison authorities would take him to the hospital for appearances sake, only to bring him right back to the anda cell without proper medical attention. “They didn't give me the medicines I needed. They gave me sleeping pills, drugged me continuously, and gave me Diclofenac for pain. My left arm was broken in the rough handling during my arrest, and that affected my spine and nervous system,” he said.
His wife Vasantha had spoken at length about how his health was disregarded and how he possibly contracted COVID-19 while in prison and was still denied treatment. Slowly, his paralysis worsened, he underwent a gallbladder surgery a week ago, and his kidney stopped functioning a day before his demise.
Saibaba’s isn’t the first account of the state’s assault on a human body. In fact, the physiological torture of political prisoners jailed under UAPA is hardly news. In November 2020, tribal rights activist Stan Swamy was denied a sipper and straw despite the fact that he was coping with Parkinson’s disease, which causes involuntary muscle spasms. Swamy passed away in jail after his bail was denied on several counts.
Following Swamy’s demise, Saibaba wrote to Vasantha, “You might hear of another Stan Swamy if no treatment is provided [to me].”
A political separation
The story of Saibaba’s incarceration is also the story of Vasantha’s ordeals.
“Sai, do you remember?” she once wrote to him in jail, “When we met for the first time in class 10, you were having trouble solving a few questions in Maths. I was the one who taught you how to solve them. In turn, you taught me English grammar. It was very difficult for us in our adolescence to stay apart without seeing each other for even four days! Look at how things are now — we have to stay apart from each other, with countless obstacles and hundreds of miles blocking our meetings, for who knows how long.”
Vasantha told me in 2021 that meeting Saibaba in jail was always tricky. “I can’t speak English well. They didn’t allow us to speak in Telugu. So several meetings passed without much being said.” She was quick to add, “But no matter what, I refuse to cry. Even a single tear will be all the testimony the authorities need to flaunt their victory. I don’t want that.”
In several interviews, Vasantha has spoken about their all-encompassing love for each other. A partnership in equal measure, she was and still remains committed to social justice, keeping a part of Saibaba still alive.
His collection of prison poems and essays begins with Vasantha’s ‘Introduction: Letter to Sai’. She recounted how they read Tagore, Premchand, Periyar, Ranganayakkam, and several other revolutionaries together, strengthened by the confidence that “a new society would certainly emerge, where caste divisions, religious differences, and gender discrimination would perish.”
A literary man, in his own words
In multiple speeches since his release, Saibaba emphasised on how literature, specifically poetry, is the only medium to resist pain. “At first, I felt anger at how unjustly I was treated in prison. But then I met others — people who were incarcerated for stealing food, a man dying in front of me, people who were charged for crimes of necessity. To translate all that and to explain it, only poetry sufficed as a medium,” he remarked.
Saibaba spoke of a certain poetic empathy that replaced his anger, or rather made it universal. As Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote of Saibaba in the essay ‘A continuous ode to life’, “His personal anguish at being uprooted from his family and community becomes also that of the farmers and Adivasi people uprooted from their land to give way to mining corporations.”
This rings true as the deceased professor informed grievers:
The world of love takes shape
in your acts of struggle for it
or when he makes a case for verse:
It’s poetry, stupid
It’s stupendous poetry
It doesn’t need weapons
To smelt break the iron heels of history.
GN Saibaba’s love, struggle, and literature trifecta is summarised in his letter to Anjum, the Muslim trans woman character from Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, whom he wrote to from prison.
“You are a unique human being in the history of human society. That is the reason why I ask you to work for my freedom. Who else can be the befitting person to campaign for my release? I am sure that you will definitely take up my cause.”