Nagpur: The Gadchiroli sessions court on Wednesday rejected bail plea of alleged Naxal sympathizer, Gokalkonda Naga Saibaba, working as professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Additional sessions judge PM Dunedar stated that the Saibaba was not entitled for bail on the grounds of illness and parity, as the court had already decided his contention of medical treatment. “The ground of parity was available to the accused when the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court had decided his bail application,” the judge said. A resident of the Amlapuram in Andhra Pradesh, Saibaba was accused of serving as the intellectual adviser to the organizations controlled by Maoists and also preaching their ideologies in and out of the classroom.
Through his disciples Hemant Mishra and Prashant Rahi, he was allegedly in contact with Maoist Narmada Akka who was gunned down in an encounter with the police in December 2012. Arrested by Gadchiroli police from Delhi on May 9 last year, Saibaba has been lodged at Nagpur Central Jail since then. Saibaba had, through his counsel Surendra Gadling, applied for the bail on the grounds of poor health and parity. Former district government pleader Prashant Sathianathan pleaded the case on prosecution`s behalf as special public prosecutor (SPP). Prior to this, the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court had also rejected his bail application on August 25 last year. Saibaba contended that he was suffering from multiple problems like kidney and gall bladder stone and needed proper medical treatment immediately. The jail authorities failed to provide it following which he even went for the hunger strike.
So afraid is the government of this paralysed wheelchair-bound academic that the Maharashtra police had to abduct him for arrest
May 9,
2015, marks one year since Dr G.N. Saibaba, lecturer of English at Ramlal Anand
College, Delhi University, was abducted by unknown men on his way home from
work. When her husband went missing and his cellphone did not respond, Vasantha,
Dr Saibaba’s wife, filed a missing person’s complaint in the local police
station. Subsequently the unknown men identified themselves as the Maharashtra
Police and described the abduction as an arrest.
Why did
they abduct him in this way when they could easily have arrested him formally,
this professor who happens to be wheelchair-bound and paralysed from his waist
downwards since he was five years old? There were two reasons: First, because
they knew from their previous visits to his house that if they picked him up
from his home on the Delhi University campus they would have to deal with a
crowd of angry people—professors, activists and students who loved and admired
Professor Saibaba not just because he was a dedicated teacher but also because
of his fearless political worldview. Second, because abducting him made it look
as though they, armed only with their wit and daring, had tracked down and
captured a dangerous terrorist. The truth is more prosaic. Many of us had known
for a long time that Professor Saibaba was likely to be arrested. It had been
the subject of open discussion for months. Never in all those months, right up
to the day of his abduction, did it ever occur to him or to anybody else that he
should do anything else but face up to it fair and square. In fact, during that
period, he put in extra hours and finished his PhD on the Politics of the
Discipline of Indian English Writing. Why did we think he would be arrested?
What was his crime?
In
September 2009, the then home minister P. Chidambaram announced a war called
Operation Green Hunt in what is known as India’s Red Corridor. It was advertised
as a clean-up operation by paramilitary forces against Maoist ‘terrorists’ in
the jungles of Central India. In reality it was the official name for what had
so far been a scorched-earth battle being waged by state-sponsored vigilante
militias (the Salwa Judum in Bastar and unnamed militias in other states). The
mandate was to clear the forests of its troublesome residents so that mining and
infrastructure-building corporations could move ahead with their stalled
projects. The fact that signing over Adivasi homelands to private corporations
is illegal and unconstitutional did not bother the UPA government of the time.
(The present government’s new Land Acquisition Act proposes to exalt that
lawlessness into law.) Thousands of paramilitary troops accompanied by vigilante
militias invaded the forests, burning villages, murdering villagers and raping
women. Tens of thousands of Adivasis were forced to flee from their homes and
hide in the jungle for months under the open sky. The backlash against this
brutality was that hundreds of local people signed up to join the People’s
Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) raised by the CPI (Maoist) who former Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh famously described as India’s “single-largest internal
security threat”. Even now, the whole region remains convulsed by what can only
be called a civil war.
As is the
case with any protracted war, the situation has become far from simple. While
some in the resistance continue to fight the good fight, others have become
opportunists, extortionists and ordinary criminals. It is not always easy to
tell one group from another, and that makes it easy to tar them all with the
same brush. Horrible atrocities have taken place. One set of atrocities is
called Terrorism and the other, Progress.
In 2010 and
2011, when Operation Green Hunt was at its most brutal, a campaign against it
began to gather speed. Public meetings and rallies took place in several cities.
As word of what was happening in the forest spread, the international media
began to pay attention. One of the main mobilisers of this public and entirely
un-secret campaign against Operation Green Hunt was Dr Saibaba. The campaign
was, at least temporarily, successful. The government was shamed into pretending
that there was no such thing as Operation Green Hunt, that it was merely a media
creation. (Of course, the assault on the Adivasi homelands continues, largely
unreported, because now it is an Operation Without a Name. This week, on May 5,
2015, Chhavindra Karma, son of Salwa Judum founder Mahendra Karma, who was
killed in a Maoist ambush, announced the inauguration of Salwa Judum-II. This
despite the Supreme Court judgement declaring Salwa Judum-I illegal and
unconstitutional and ordering that it be disbanded.)
In
Operation No-Name, anybody who criticises or impedes the implementation of state
policy is called a Maoist. Thousands of Dalits and Adivasis, thus labelled, are
in jail absurdly charged with crimes like sedition and waging war against the
state under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA)—a law which would
make any intelligent human being bust a gut laughing if only the uses to which
it is being put were not so tragic. While villagers languish for years in
prison, with no legal help and no hope of justice, often not even sure what
crime they have been accused of, the state has turned its attention to what it
calls ‘OGWs’—Overground Workers—in the cities.
Determined
not to allow a repeat of the situation it found itself in earlier, the Union
ministry of home affairs spelled out its intentions clearly in its 2013
affidavit filed in the Supreme Court. It said: “The ideologues and supporters of
the CPI (Maoist) in cities and towns have undertaken a concerted and systematic
propaganda against the state to project it in a poor light...it is these
ideologues who have kept the Maoist movement alive and are in many ways more
dangerous than the cadres of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.”
Enter Dr
Saibaba.
We knew he
was a marked man when several clearly planted, hyperbolic stories about him
began to appear in the papers. (When they don’t have real evidence, their next
best option—tried and tested—is to create a climate of suspicion around their
quarry.)
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On
September 12, 2013, his home was raided by 50 policemen armed with a search
warrant for stolen property from a magistrate in Aheri, a small town in
Maharashtra. They did not find any stolen property. Instead they took away
(stole?) his property. His personal laptop, hard disks and pen drives. Two weeks
later, Suhas Bawache, the investigating officer for the case, rang Dr Saibaba
and asked him for the passwords to access the hard disks. He gave it to them. On
January 9, 2014, a team of policemen interrogated him at his home for several
hours. And on May 9, they abducted him. That same night they flew him to Nagpur
and from there drove him to Aheri and then back to Nagpur with hundreds of
policemen escorting the convoy of jeeps and mine-proof vehicles. He was
incarcerated in the Nagpur central jail in its notorious ‘Anda Cell’, adding his
name to the three hundred thousand undertrials who crowd our country’s prisons.
In the midst of all the high theatre, his wheelchair was damaged. Dr Saibaba is
what is known as “90 per cent disabled”. In order to prevent his physical
condition from further deteriorating, he needs constant care, physiotherapy and
medication. Despite this, he was thrown into a bare cell (where he still
remains) with nobody to assist him even to use the bathroom. He had to crawl
around on all fours. None of this would fall under the definition of torture. Of
course not. The great advantage the state has over this particular prisoner is
that he is not equal among prisoners. He can be cruelly tortured, perhaps even
killed, without anybody having to so much as lay a finger on him.
The next
morning’s papers in Nagpur had front-page pictures of the heavily armed team of
Maharashtra Police proudly posing with their trophy—the dreaded terrorist,
Professor pow, in his damaged wheelchair.
He has been
charged under the UAPA, Sections 13 (taking part in/advocating/abetting/inciting
the commission of unlawful activity), Section 18 (conspiring/attempting to
commit a terrorist act), Section 20 (being a member of a terrorist gang or
organisation), Section 38 (associating with a terrorist organisation with
intention to further its activities) and Section 39 (inviting support and
addressing meetings for the purpose of encouraging support for a terrorist
organisation.) He has been accused of giving a computer chip to Hem Mishra, a
JNU student, to deliver to Comrade Narmada of the CPI (Maoist). Hem Mishra was
arrested at the Ballarshah railway station in August 2013 and is in Nagpur jail
along with Dr Saibaba. The three others accused with them in this ‘conspiracy’
are out on bail.
Another of
the serious offences listed in the chargesheet is that Dr Saibaba is the joint
secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), an organisation that is
banned in Orissa and Andhra Pradesh where it is suspected to be a Maoist ‘front’
organisation. It is not banned in Delhi. Or Maharashtra. The president of RDF is
the well-known poet Varavara Rao who lives in Hyderabad.
Dr
Saibaba’s trial has not begun. When it does, it is likely to take months, if not
years. The question is, can a person with a 90 per cent disability survive in
those abysmal prison conditions for so long?
In the year
he’s been in prison, his physical condition has deteriorated alarmingly. He is
in constant, excruciating pain. (The jail authorities have helpfully described
this as “quite normal” for polio victims.) His spinal cord has degenerated. It
has buckled and is pushing up against his lungs. His left arm has stopped
functioning. The cardiologist at the local hospital where the jail authorities
took him for a test has asked that he be given an angioplasty urgently. If he
does undergo an angioplasty, given his condition and the conditions in prison,
the prognosis is dire. If he does not, and remains incarcerated, it is dire too.
Time and again the jail authorities have disallowed him medication that is vital
not just to his well-being, but to his survival. When they do allow the
medicines, they disallow the special diet that is meant to go with
it.
Despite the
fact that India is party to international covenants on disability rights, and
Indian law expressly forbids the incarceration of a person who is disabled as an
undertrial for a prolonged period, Dr Saibaba has been denied bail twice by the
sessions court. On the second occasion, bail was denied based on the jail
authorities demonstrating to the court that they were giving him the specific,
special care a person in his condition required. (They did allow his family to
replace his wheelchair.) Dr Saibaba, in a letter from prison, said that the day
the order denying him bail came, the special care was withdrawn. Driven to
despair, he went on a hunger strike. Within a few days, he was taken to hospital
unconscious.
For the
sake of argument, let’s leave the decision about whether Dr Saibaba is guilty or
innocent of the charges levelled against him to the courts. And let’s, for just
a moment, turn our attention solely to the question of bail, because for him
that is quite literally a question of life and death.
No matter
what the charges against him are, should Professor Saibaba get bail? Here’s a
list of a few well-known public figures and government servants who have been
given bail.
On April
23, 2015, Babu Bajrangi, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his
role in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre in which 97 people were murdered in
broad daylight, was released on bail by the Gujarat High Court for an “urgent
eye operation”. This is Babu Bajrangi in his own words speaking about the crime
he committed: “We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire,
we set them on fire and killed them—hacked, burnt, set on fire.... We believe in
setting them on fire because these bastards don’t want to be cremated. They’re
afraid of it.”—‘After
killing them, I felt like Maharana Pratap’ in Tehelka, September
1, 2007
Eye
operation, huh? Well maybe on second thoughts it really is urgent that he
replace the murderous lenses he seems to view the world through with something
less stupid and less dangerous.
On July 30,
2014, Maya Kodnani, a former minister of the Modi government in Gujarat,
convicted and serving a 28-year sentence for being the ‘kingpin’ of that same
Naroda Patiya massacre, was granted bail by the Gujarat High Court. Kodnani is a
medical doctor and says she suffers from intestinal tuberculosis, a heart
condition, clinical depression and a spinal problem. Her sentence has been
suspended.
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Amit Shah,
also a former minister in the Modi government in Gujarat, was arrested in July
2010, accused of ordering the extrajudicial killing of three people—Sohrabuddin
Sheikh, his wife Kausar Bi and Tulsiram Prajapati. The CBI produced phone
records showing that Shah was in constant touch with the police officials who
held the victims in illegal custody before they were murdered, and that the
number of phone calls between him and those police officials spiked sharply
during those days. Amit Shah was released on bail three months after his arrest.
(Subsequently, after a series of disturbing and mysterious events, he has been
let off altogether.) He is currently the president of the BJP, and the right
hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
On May 22,
1987, 42 Muslim men rounded up in a truck by the Provincial Armed Constabulary
(PAC) were shot dead in cold blood on the outskirts of Hashimpura and their
bodies were dumped in a canal. Nineteen members of the PAC were accused in the
case. All of them were allowed to continue in service, receiving their
promotions and bonuses like everybody else. Thirteen years later, in the year
2000, 16 of them surrendered (three had died). They were released on bail
immediately. A few weeks ago, in March 2015, all 16 were acquitted for lack of
evidence.
Hany Babu,
a teacher in Delhi University and a member of the Committee for the Defence and
Release of Saibaba, was recently able to meet Dr Saibaba for a few minutes in
hospital. At a press conference on April 23, 2015, that went more or less
unreported, Hany Babu described the circumstances of the meeting: Dr Saibaba, on
a saline drip, sat up in bed and spoke to him. A security guard stood over him
with an AK-47 pointed at his head. It was his duty to make sure the prisoner did
not run away on his paralysed legs.
Will Dr
Saibaba come out of the Nagpur central jail alive? Do they want him to? There is
much to suggest they do not.
This is
what we put up with, what we vote for, what we agree to.
This
is us.
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