InSAF India: This is undoubtedly a state murder!
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When crime, justice, and punishment become weaponized by a state founded on oppression and violence, those who become the voice of the oppressed are either imprisoned or killed. These murders occur under the guise of constitutionality, legality, and judicial process. Meanwhile, people without a conscience silently approve of these atrocities.
What crime did Prof. Saibaba commit? Why was he kept in solitary confinement for ten years? Ten years of relentless torture. After which the state eventually admitted that he had committed no crime.
Before his imprisonment, Saibaba had no health issues. It was the inhumane conditions of prison that completely destroyed his health. This is exactly what the state wanted: to push him to an irreversible state or to kill him. This is what was done to Pandu Narote and Father Stan Swamy. The state has pushed many political prisoners, illegally detained in the Bhima Koregaon conspiracy case, to the brink of death.
After being released, Saibaba gave interviews to numerous national and international media outlets and human rights organisations. In all these conversations, he never expressed self-pity, never asked, “Why did this happen to me?” To those who showed sympathy for his disability and the harsh conditions he faced in prison, he boldly said, “I don’t need sympathy, I need solidarity.” A true fighter, he never glorified himself, never showed any signs of fear or despair. He believed everything he did was part of his revolutionary practice for the greater good of society.
In a Telugu interview, Saibaba was asked, “You were imprisoned for ten years just for speaking about Adivasi rights. Why are you still talking about them now?” His response still echoes in my ears: “If someone who considers themselves civilized doesn’t speak for the oppressed Adivasis, then that civilization itself is meaningless.”
As Saibaba departs, he leaves us with a question to reflect on: our intellectual pride, self-praise, illusions of development, and fears. As a civilized and humane person, where do you stand in the ultimate war that the Sanatan corporate state is waging against the Adivasis? What will be the fate of Dalits, Bahujans, religious minorities, and women in the ‘New India’ (which in essence is a Sanatan India) that this regime dreams of? Perhaps Saibaba came (as he said, from a small prison to a larger one) and left us with this challenge.
Despite his many health issues, he spoke with hundreds of people, made numerous plans, and had much more to write. He was eager to return to the classroom and teach again. Though those plans may come to a halt, the path he chose and the courage he showed will never cease.
Shame on you, state! You killed a humanitarian. You may have physically eliminated Prof. Saibaba, but do you have the power to kill his spirit? From Socrates to Antonio Gramsci to Saibaba, you have killed countless public intellectuals and activists. But you have never been able to nor will ever be able to erase their paths. Do you not know what history tells us? In the ultimate struggle, the people will emerge victorious!
Salutes to Prof. G. N. Saibaba, the immortal humanist who fought for the oppressed of this land! As long as there are people who care for their fellow humans and for nature, you will live on.
Long live Prof. Saibaba!
We may not be able to walk in your procession, but we and others will continue to walk the path you have traversed!
One of Your Comrades
InSAF India: Dear Doctors,
Dear Doctors,
When you remove Saibaba’s eyes,
Please add a touch of gentleness,
For in them lie traces of the world he dreamt of,
That might unfold within someone else.
Please extract his heart with utmost skill,
For in that tenacious heart that denied death
In the fascist Manuvadi regime’s prison,
You may find the roots of tender compassion
For the Adivasis and the oppressed masses.
In constant captivity, grappling with illness,
He stood firm for his beliefs.
Please check, perhaps, those polio-stricken legs
Could leave a mark on the faces
Of the chameleon activists who preach a new ideology every day.
One more, final request …
Please preserve that brain even more carefully for the future generations,
For though ninety percent disabled,
His “thinking mind” made this exploitative system tremble with fear.
Someday, it may help someone identify the system’s weak link.
Janjerla Ramesh Babu
President, Telangana Forum Against Displacement
(With a heart burdened by sorrow for the sudden martyrdom of Comrade G.N. Saibaba…)
InSAF India: Prof GN Saibaba, We Salute You Comrade
We hereby share a statement published by the International Solidarity for Academic Freedom (InSAF) in India.
The Ocean is His Voice — GN Saibaba
His poetry smells of the soil
In it, the oceans churn:
The whirling cyclonic
Eastern winds roar;
The thunderous Western monsoon clouds
Carry torrents of rains
The collective voice speaks
Through his nimble words.
His lullabies hum children
Into dreams of Future’s visual frames
Artwork: Lokesh Khodke
G.N. Saibaba – professor of English, poet, and comrade – is no longer with us. Acquitted and released from prison after a decade of an unjust and brutal incarceration, he died within seven months of his release. He was convicted in 2017 in a hasty trial in which twenty-two of the twenty-three witnesses were policemen and the remaining one a citizen who knew nothing about the case but was coerced into signing a statement by the police. The state proved that the “life sentence” it handed to him was effectively a death sentence.
In the intervening years, GN Saibaba’s health deteriorated. He was struck by Covid twice, began losing function in both arms, suffered from declining cardiovascular health, and endured excruciating pain. When the jail authorities installed a CCTV camera in his toilet and refused to give him a plastic water bottle, he went on a hunger strike and won. They took in a man afflicted with polio, but otherwise fully functional, vital, and healthy – and “freed” someone who needed immediate and urgent care and did not survive a year of that “freedom.”
Why, G.N. Saibaba asked, “do they fear my way so much?” He knew that the state held him as an example to strike fear to such an extent that people would silence themselves. He was arrested in 2014 for his opposition to Operation Green Hunt, the name of the extractive campaign launched under the Manmohan Singh government to steal the mineral rich lands of the indigenous people in Central India and hand them over to corporate control – a war by the state on its own people. This war, including aerial bombing of Adivasi villages, continued during the decade Saibaba was in prison.
G.N. Saibaba was jailed by a state that hoped his ideas too would die behind bars. Justice M.R. Shah, who was part of the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court that stayed G.N.S.’s first acquittal in 2022, said, “The brain is the most dangerous thing. For terrorists or Maoists, the brain is everything. Direct involvement is not necessary.” We must not forget this.
InSAF India was formed in response to the arrests of academics, scholars, journalists, artists and activists. Since then, we have grieved for the deaths of Father Stan Swamy, Pandu Narote, and now G.N. Saibaba. To honour their lives, we must carry on living their commitment to justice. We must defeat the strategy of fear deployed by the state to silence truth-telling. Academic freedom is necessary for a just and egalitarian society, but it is seeded, nurtured and sustained by people’s struggles.
We have lost a people’s poet and a public intellectual today, but we have his words, his teachings and his deeds to take with us into the future – a future worthy of being sung in children’s lullabies.
We salute you, comrade!
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