In March 2024, former Delhi University professor GN Saibaba was released from Nagpur Central Jail after spending almost a decade behind bars. Seven months later, on 12 October, Saturday, the 57-year-old passed away at NIMS Hospital in Hyderabad following health complications after undergoing surgery for gallbladder stones.
I understand that we are all stardust. We are congealed and self-conscious fragments of our brilliant universe that, having roamed freely for aeons, strayed towards Earth and eventually, slowly, drawn by gravity, found their form and home in us, mere mortals. Today, you have returned to the largesse of the stars. Perhaps you find yourself more at home. Stardust to stardust.
I would like to think that today, you experience and share a freedom that cannot be curtailed by the petty despots and tyrants who want to determine the fates of millions, though they hardly understand anything, including their own littleness and greed.
For too long, you were holed up in a small cell, dragged by one arm on the ground by state officials who had neither the imagination nor the intelligence to recognise our common humanity. For too long, you were denied medicines, medical attention, and hospitalisation. You were denied care for the arm they destroyed.
For 10 years, you were shunted from court to court, back and forth, between people who refused to take responsibility for the terrible and inhuman injustice being done to you. Square pegs, little boxes, bricks in the wall. Even as you wrote lucid and moving letters from jail, the state’s will to inscribe on your body and mind the cruelty of its imperious logic and its absolute indifference to basic rights, grew more savage.
Your mind never faltered, but your body began breaking. Hypertension, heart problems, recurring pancreatitis, untreated bouts of COVID, and ever-increasing disabilities. This is what they do in jail. They scare you away and try to kill you.
Father Stan Swamy was killed, Pandu Narote was killed, Varavara Rao was almost killed, and Hany Babu with lasting health issues, the list is endless.
But even as I write this, I remember you as I always experienced you: as free. I clearly remember that sense of freedom and immense possibilities that you had despite your ever-present wheelchair. I remember your laughter when my daughter who was then five or six years old, pushed your wheelchair really fast! Perhaps it also reminded you of something.
You once told me about an early profound experience of freedom. You had been crippled by polio despite your parents’ best efforts to protect your legs from wasting and spent a lot of time relatively immobile. Then, one day, your father put you on his cycle and took you on a long ride, showing you the village and world that you were a part of. He did that day after day, sparking within you a desire and a journey that grew more and more profound, more and more significant.
Your intuitive but well-informed understanding of both power and freedom goes way back. How well you understood the tyranny of unbridled power and the evil eye it cast upon freedom. You were arrested under the UAPA in the most lawless, unprocedural, and criminal way (you were abducted!) for the most constitutional of demands – freedom and social justice for the poorest of the poor. Inevitably, the work remains unfinished.
And now, I cannot but help thinking of the other things that you left unfinished – a conversation that we began and decided to continue after you returned from Hyderabad, a half-read book, an idea for a book, mango pickle plans, a visit to my home, a renewed fight for justice. Today, as I write this to you, I remember your extraordinary mother who slowly died of a broken heart years after your incarceration. I think of Vasantha and Manjeera, my larger family.
Travel well into a better time and shine with the stars.
(Karen Gabriel teaches English at Stephen’s College, Delhi University. Views are personal.)
