Human rights defender and academic, G N Saibaba (57) died on Saturday, October 12 at Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences Hospital in Hyderabad due to cardiac arrest. His death took place merely seven months after being released from a decade of wrongful imprisonment in Indian jails.
Saibaba was over 90% handicapped and bound to a wheelchair due to being infected with polio as a child. After his release in March this year, Saibaba testified that prison authorities systematically denied him necessary medical treatment for his numerous medical conditions which led to the severe deterioration of his already weak health. This intentional medical negligence has been described as torture by many.
During his incarceration, Saibaba repeatedly went on hunger strike to protest the denial of basic facilities despite his ailing health. His family members and close colleagues had often claimed that his life was under threat in jail as authorities deliberately neglected his health concerns.
At the time of his death, Saibaba was going through a treatment for an infection which he caught after undergoing an operation to remove his gallbladder last month.
Professor G.N. Saibaba, human rights defender who was wrongly incarcerated for almost a decade in India passed away today following deteriorating health conditions.
Saibaba always stood with the oppressed and marginalized throughout his life. This just struggle ultimately cost… pic.twitter.com/1v40TLR7UP
— Peoples Dispatch (@peoplesdispatch) October 12, 2024
Claiming that Saibaba was “a victim of institutional murder-killed by a state that falsely accused him, despite acquittals by one court after the other,” Vijay Prashad wrote on X that “his death is a stain on the government of Narendra Modi,” India’s ultra-right prime minister.
Saibaba, along with five others, was first arrested in May 2014 under India’s draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (also known as UAPA). He was granted bail on health grounds after a year but was arrested again within months and charged with having links with banned Maoist groups in the country that are engaged in armed struggle against the Indian state, popularly referred to as Naxals. These groups are largely concentrated in the tribal areas of central India which are also rich in minerals and other natural resources. At the end of the 2000s, the Indian government launched Operation Green Hunt, which was a state-sponsored military offensive against the territories allegedly controlled by the “left-wing extremist” groups.
Saibaba was one of the prominent voices opposing the operation claiming it violated the rights of the local population and is used as an excuse to displace Indigenous people from their land and resources.
A local court in Maharasthra’s Gadchiroli convicted him and four others to life sentences on the charges of terror links in March 2017. In response to an appeal, a Bombay High court bench overturned the convictions in October 2022.
The government appealed the acquittal in the country’s Supreme Court which quashed that acquittal and asked for a fresh hearing. After 17 months, another bench of the same Bombay High court reiterated the verdict of the previous bench and acquitted Saibaba and others in March 2024. This time the Supreme Court upheld the verdict paving the way for Saibaba and others’ release.
BJP government’s repression of progressive voices
While acquitting Saibaba, the Bombay High Court criticized the investigation carried out by the police and trial court for ignoring the fact that there was no substantial evidence to convict Saibaba and others. Rights activists have maintained that Saibaba and other activists were persecuted by the state because of their vocal opposition to the government’s violations against Indigenous communities and civilians in the name of “fighting Maoism”.
At the time of his arrest, Saibaba was a professor of English at the University of Delhi. The university first suspended and later terminated him from service, months after he was convicted. It refused to reinstate him after his acquittal.
After his release, Saibaba had also claimed that the state sought to target and silence the voices who spoke out in support of his case. For example, his first lawyer, Surendra Gadling, was arrested immediately after Saibaba was convicted, with Gadling facing charges related to the Bhima Koregaon (Elgar Parishad) case.
About a dozen activists, academicians and lawyers were arrested in June 2018 under the Bhima Koregaon case, accused by the Indian state, of being involved in violence which broke out in Pune in India’s Maharashtra state on January 1, 2018 during an annual event commemorating the assertion of the country’s socially marginalized caste groups against the dominant caste groups. Later, the Hindu-supremacist government went on to claim that the arrested had links with Maoist groups and were involved in a plot to assassinate the prime minister.
Though some of those arrested were released after spending over five years in jail, the majority of them are still in prison while no trial has begun in the case yet.
Professor Hany Babu, a colleague of Saibaba too, was arrested later in the same case. Some allege that his incarceration without trial for the last four years is in connection to his vocal defense of Saibaba.
Pandu Narote, who was convicted with Saibaba, died in August 2022 while in prison due to a significant delay in his treatment of swine flu infection. He was 33 when he died. 84-year-old Father Stan Swamy, tried in the Bhima Koregaon case, died in prison in July 2021 after courts denied him bail.
Left parties issued a statement after the death of Saibaba holding the state responsible for his death. “We mourn the death of Saibaba, a target and victim of the Modi government’s repressive policies in which he was imprisoned for a decade,” said Communist Party of India (Marxist) in a social media post. “In sorrow and anger at the injustice he suffered, we salute this brave fighter for justice.”
