On October 17, Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba, a 57-year-old former teacher at Delhi University, breathed his last at a hospital in southern India due to complications following a gallstone operation. While it would on record be a case of natural death — cardiac failure due to post-operative complications — people close to him and noted human rights defenders described it on social media posts and media articles as an “institutional murder.”
A paraplegic, Saibaba died about seven months after his release following a decade of incarceration, including seven years in a prison cell meant for notorious criminals.
The wheelchair-bound assistant professor of English at the Ram Lal Anand College in the national capital of New Delhi was arrested in May 2014 and charged with being a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and its frontal organizations. The college initially suspended and later dismissed him from his job.
He was booked, among other penal provisions, under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), an anti-terror law controversial for its scope for violating human rights. The provisions of the law make obtaining bail extremely difficult; the onus is not on the prosecution to prove the accused guilty but on the accused to prove themselves innocent. Courts rarely grant bail, even as the UAPA’s conviction rate is abysmally low. Governments have been accused of using UAPA more to suppress dissent and stifle civil liberties, rights defenders have repeatedly alleged.
In June 2015, after a year in jail, Saibaba was granted bail on medical grounds for treatment purposes but he had to return to the prison in December. The Supreme Court granted him bail in April 2016 but he had to go back to jail in March 2017, after a district court in western India’s Maharashtra state convicted him and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
He challenged the verdict before the Bombay High Court, which acquitted him in October 2022, calling the process of arrest and investigation flawed. However, the Maharashtra government approached the Supreme Court that very night and the top court stayed the high court order and prevented Saibaba’s release. The apex court bench argued that the high court decided on the basis of procedures but not evidence.
In 2023, the apex court ordered a different bench of the Bombay High Court to re-examine his case. In March 2024, this bench, too, acquitted Saibaba. He was finally released but his health conditions had worsened.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) listed among Saibaba’s health complications “heart conditions, brain cyst, hypertension, breathing difficulties, back pain, and nerve damage.” He had also contracted COVID-19 and swine flu while in prison.
While acquitting him in 2024, the Bombay High Court pointed out the manipulation of evidence right from the time of the raid and seizure at his residence. The search and seizure procedure requires the presence of an independent and respectable witness. However, even though Saibaba lived on the Delhi University campus, the police did not opt for any professor, student, scholar or government official as a “witness.”
They had a barber, who could not read or write any language except to sign in English, as a witness. Neither had he any understanding of what digital evidence means nor was he present during the search and seizure. His admissions in court during cross-examinations “speak volumes about the credibility of the process of entire search and seizure,” the court observed and pointed out how the FIR and arrest memos had telltale signs of manipulation. This time, the top court found the high court order “well reasoned.”
During the entire period in jail, Saibaba’s childhood sweetheart and wife, Vasantha, made repeated pleas to jail authorities and courts to ensure he received the necessary medical treatment.
On the day of his release in March, Saibaba said it was “a wonder” that he could come out alive. He alleged that he entered the prison as a healthy man except for polio-inflicted lower-body paralysis and his dependence on a wheelchair. However, the “rigorous and brutal” jail life without “any active medical treatment” caused a host of health issues, including heart, muscle and liver problems.
“Doctors said I had to undergo multiple operations and surgeries but nothing was done. My heart is working at only 55 percent capacity and this has been recorded by the doctors,” Saibaba had said.
After his death, Delhi University professor and columnist Apoorvanand asked, “Why are we unable to accept that it was a death due to complications arising from surgery? Why do we feel that Saibaba’s death is not a death but a murder? A murder for which the state and the judiciary must take responsibility?” Apporvanand wrote that “the inhuman life in jail inflicted him with various diseases and his body became completely hollow.”
Interestingly, media reports in 2023 suggested that the Bombay High Court judge who acquitted Saibaba in 2022 resigned in 2023 after the Supreme Court transferred him to another high court, “based on intelligence inputs” regarding his Saibaba judgment. The judge announced his resignation from the judiciary in public during court proceedings, citing personal reasons.
Saibaba is not the only scholar-cum-human rights activist to face distressing jail terms on terror charges in recent years. Scholar-cum-Dalit (Hindu lower caste) rights activist Anand Teltumbde, Delhi University Professor Hany Babu, Professor Shoma Sen, Poet Varavara Rao, journalist-cum-human rights activist Gautam Navlakha and former Jawaharlal University scholar Umar Khalid have spent several years in jail on charges that they and civil liberties defenders call flimsy.
In most of their cases, even the trial hasn’t started after several years. They are all connected by the UAPA. Babu and Khalid are still behind bars, while Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest and tribal rights activist, died in a hospital while in the custody of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for nine months.
Swamy died on July 5, 2021, the day his bail hearing was scheduled. While in the hospital under police custody, he was denied basic needs like a drinking straw, sipper and warm clothes.
Khalid’s case has become another talking point. After a trial court rejected his bail plea in March 2022 and the Delhi high court upheld it in October 2022, Khalid moved the Supreme Court, where his bail petition has had no substantial hearing till February 2024. Scheduled hearings were adjourned 14 times, due to reasons including judges recusing themselves, paucity of time and the bench failing to convene.
Finally, Khalid withdrew the petition in the top court to try his luck by starting afresh. The lower court again rejected the bail plea in May. He is yet to have a hearing in the high court.
While prominent human rights activists have undergone such experiences, the treatment some of India’s self-styled godmen have received is quite a contrast – rape convict Gurmit Ram Rahim Singh was released 14 times in four years on parole. In the socio-politically sensitive case of a gangrape of a Muslim woman during the 2002 Gujarat riots, 10 of the 11 men sentenced to life imprisonment were out of jail for more than 1000 days each — on parole.
Saibaba’s book, “Why do you fear my way so much? Poems and Letters from Prison,” was published in 2022. Poetry and letters kept hope alive in him, even though he did fear he would share Swamy’s fate. He almost did.
In an editorial, two days after Saibaba’s death, the Hindustan Times, one of India’s leading English dailies, said that his death put “the spotlight on the need to ensure that constitutional safeguards are followed even in cases involving national security.”
“Terrorism is a scourge, one that must be wiped out. But laws meant to nab terrorists must be balanced with constitutional freedoms guarding individual liberty and must not make the process the punishment,” said the editorial. It added that Saibaba’s years in jail and the denial of his bail are “a reminder that every stakeholder in the criminal justice system must ensure a tough but fair prosecution that adheres to constitutional safeguards.”
The same day, an Indian Express editorial echoed the concerns. “Today, when Saibaba is no more, the judiciary would be failing its constitutional role if it doesn’t find ways to correct a system in which hard laws are invoked indiscriminately and, all too frequently, justice is denied through delay,” it said.
Stan Swamy’s death could not make any change. Can Saibaba’s untimely departure?