The Cruel Loss of GN Saibaba: How Many More Vasanthas Will There Be?

What of Banojyotsna, who switched jobs to fight Umar's case and Sharjeel’s mother, waiting for her son to come home?

April 7, 2016 file photo former Delhi University professor GN Saibaba is seen with his wife Vasantha Kumari outside the Nagpur Central Jail.

(Photo: PTI)

A plethora of odes and laments have flooded the internet in the aftermath of GN Saibaba’s tragic demise.

In an article published in The News Minute, Anjana Meenakshi described him as a “staunch human rights activist of the Left, a beloved professor and comrade, and a doting husband.” The Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M), meanwhile, held the Modi government responsible for Saibaba’s demise, noting that along with being denied bail for several years, Saibaba was also denied urgent and adequate medical treatment. Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary D Raja too called his death “institutional murder,” citing a denial to him of “elementary human rights”.

There is not much left to say about Saibaba that hasn’t been said already. So I will focus my attention on Vasantha, his life partner who waited for his release for years, only to lose him once again, within months.

It is impossible to think about Saibaba, without thinking about Vasantha. In the latter’s own words (as told to The Indian Express), “There is no Vasantha without Sai.”

Vasantha and Sai met when they were children, fell in love, and shared a life together. When Saibaba was nearly released from prison after being discharged by the Bombay High Court in 2022, but stopped in his tracks, Vasantha told The Caravan that Sai was everything to her. “Sai and I, we are one.”

When Sai suffered, Vasantha suffered too.

And he did suffer infinitely, spending years of his life wheel-chair bound, within the confines of an Anda Cell in Nagpur Central jail. From there, he wrote to his beloved Vasantha about their love, but also about suffering extreme pain, and about the cruelty meted out to him in jail. “Now I can feel irreparable damage being done to my internal organs,” he wrote in one of his letters. In yet another, he said, “You might hear of another Stan Swamy if no treatment is provided [to me].”

Meanwhile, Vasantha wrote back with an equal amount of love and longing. In one of her letters (as per an excerpt shared on X), she said, “We shall never be lonely. We have been companions to each other and we shall remain as such.”

But it was never truly easy for Vasantha. She also wrote in that same letter of how the separation was wearing her down, how the winters after her menopause were particularly tough, and how she had been pleading before the Maharashtra governor and chief minister to transfer her ailing husband to a jail closer home.

She also recalled the first time she came to meet Saibaba in jail, and was disallowed a mulaqat, because they had different surnames and the jail authorities refused to believe that they were married. This particular anecdote is uncannily reminiscent of what Gautam Navlakha’s partner Sahba Husain had once told me in an interview for Scroll.

Navlakha, like Saibaba, was also a political prisoner incarcerated under sections of India’s stringent anti-terror law (Unlawful Activities [Prevention] Act or UAPA), even though unlike Saibaba (who was convicted by a lower court and acquitted on appeal) he has not yet been convicted.

While Navlakha was arrested in April 2020, it was not until a court order and subsequent National Investigation Agency checks at their residence that Husain was allowed to meet him in February 2021. Prior to that, the jail authorities had consistently denied them meetings, simply because they were an unmarried couple. This was despite the fact that the duo had been together for 30 years.

Both Vasantha and Sahba’s stories are those of love getting entangled in the whirr of a bureaucratic machinery, and of lives being ripped apart by the might of an angry state. The damage is not limited to the arrestee. It bleeds into the lives of those who love them. But these stories of love and suffering are also not limited to Vasantha and Sahba.

One thinks of Banojyotsna Lahiri, who reportedly switched jobs so that she could devote more time to fighting the legal battle for her partner Umar Khalid — who has been behind bars, without a conviction, for over four years now. Or of Jenny Rowena, who had to struggle for her husband Hany Babu to get the level of medical care he needed for a serious eye infection. Or of Sharjeel Imam’s widowed mother, who told her son before he surrendered to the police: “Go, I place you in Allah’s custody. Only he knows best.” Four years and six months later, Afshan Rahim is still waiting for Sharjeel to come home.

Vasantha’s loss is as unique as it is not. But it is indubitably heartbreaking to spend years waiting for your loved one only to be united with them for a spell as fleeting as a dream.

It is a small (and twisted) relief that Saibaba was at least a free man when he died, unlike Stan Swamy who had begged the courts (to no avail) to allow him to spend the last of his days among his loved ones back home. Saibaba’s demise is also unlike that of his co-accused Pandu Narote, an agricultural worker who passed away before he could be acquitted, not having seen his wife or daughter in the nine years since his arrest.

But it is also agonising to discover that Saibaba and his family did not even get enough time to discuss plans for the future. Since he had stepped out, all Vasantha had done was wheel Saibaba in and out of hospitals, seemingly with the hope of treating the havoc wreaked by years of incarceration on his fragile body.

Thanks to the repeated findings of the Bombay High Court (two separate benches!), we know now that Saibaba did not need to be in prison. That his prolonged incarceration was unwarranted. That the attrition of his life was unnecessary. That there was no case really to hold him back.

That Vasantha, an innocent woman, paid a price for a crime that was never committed. And that even though Saibaba was eventually acquitted, Vasantha was, ten years ago, unknowingly separated from her beloved forever.

And as my heart goes out to Vasantha, it begs two simple questions: How many others will meet the same fate as Saibaba? And how many more Vasanthas will there be?

(With inputs from The News Minute, The Wire, The Indian Express, Scroll, Mid Day and PTI)

(Mekhala Saran is an independent journalist and researcher, formerly The Quint's Principal Correspondent [Legal]. Find her on X @mekhala_saran.)