Why Do You Fear My Way So Much?
Professor G. N. Saibaba (1967—2024)
(This is the text of what I said and what I could not say (due to the time limit and other reasons) at a Professor G. N. Saibaba Memorial Meeting at the Mumbai Press Club on October 17, 2024.)
Professor Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba, communist political activist, radical left intellectual, scholar of Indian writing in English, poet, writer, and dedicated teacher, died on October 12, 2024, seven months after acquittal following eight and a half years of brutal imprisonment, in the course of which a number of his body organs had begun to fail.
Professor Saibaba’s life, or rather, Sai’s life, for that is what his friends called him, cannot be adequately understood without situating him in an authentic history and “present as history” of the Indian society of which he was a part. There are definite links between what Sai experienced and what he did and the historical and contemporary processes and changes, and the class and other contradictions which affected him. Those other contradictions emanate from the caste system, racial discrimination, and semi-feudal and capitalist patriarchy, whose main victims, have been Dalits and the so-called ritually “impure” Shudra jatis (sub-castes), Adivasis, and women, respectively. These three contradictions have also effectively divided the exploited and the oppressed. So, Sai not only has to be located in the times of which he was a part, but also in the social processes and contradictions which influenced and affected him. The ethos and quintessence of those times must be taken into account.
The year of Sai’s birth, 1967, happened to be the year of the Naxalbari uprising. Indeed, that “Spring Thunder Over India” had roared out a grave warning to the political establishment and the ruling classes. Revolution has been in the air and on the ground ever since, albeit, developing slowly and unevenly, and remaining almost entirely unfinished, thwarted by its inevitable accompaniment, counterrevolution. In the counterrevolution, led by the Indian state, the end has necessarily justified the means—bent on wiping out the unfinished revolution by all available means, violating with impunity Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Protocol II of 1977 relating to non-international armed conflict, of which India chose to remain a non-signatory.
The revolutionists, especially at times when survival in the face of the barbarity unleashed against them, have been forced to resort to no restraints in the fight to defend their unfinished revolution. For me, author of India after Naxalbari: Unfinished Revolution)—and I do not presume to speak on behalf of anyone or any organization but myself—one important learning from the history of revolutions, applicable here too, is that the violence of the oppressed has always been preceded and provoked by the violence of the oppressors.
What was/is the “crime” of Sai, and the Bhima-Koregaon (BK) accused? (The latter, variously but taken together—communists, poets, artists, writers, journalists, scholars, literary critics, professors, human rights lawyers, grassroots democracy activists, civil liberties and democratic rights activists, bards and lyricists, and even a practitioner of liberation theology, the Jesuit priest and Adivasi rights activist, Father Stan Swamy.) It was/is the “crime” of all those who refuse to remain unmoved and inactive in an India where hundreds of millions of people have been and are the victims of capitalism’s irrationality, brutality, and inhumanity. Despite the skill, the ingenuity, and the diligence of the Indian people, most of India’s population is still inadequately fed, miserably clothed, wretchedly housed, poorly educated, and without access to decent medical care. Worse still—monstrous income and wealth inequality, the unleashing of the super-exploitation—expropriation dynamic with a vengeance that is a major determinant of that monstrosity, the rise and consolidation of Hindutva nationalism, semi-fascism and sub-imperialism. Sai’s and the BK accused’s “crime” is the crime of all those who refuse to remain unmoved and inactive in an India whose deeply oppressive and exploitative social order is crying out for revolutionary change.
Sai and Father Stan Swamy, both of whom died because of the utter callousness of the repressive apparatus of the Indian state and the failure of the Indian judiciary, had thrown their lot with the wretched of the earth, put themselves on their side and came to their defense. And for what they thereby did, they were persecuted. And yet they persisted, for they deeply understood that what this wretched of the earth, this proletariat and semi-proletariat in India, especially Dalits and Adivasis, needed most was dignity, solidarity and empathy among themselves in the face of exploitation and oppression, this even more than they needed roti (bread). And, the means that Sai, Father Stan and the other BK accused, partisans in common, employed, are best expressed in these lines:
Where are the weapons?
I have only those of my reason
…
— PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
POET, FILMMAKER, NOVELIST, AND POLITICAL JOURNALIST—IN AN AUDACIOUS AND INSPIRING POEM, WRITTEN IN 1964, ENTITLED “VICTORY,” TRANSLATED BY NORMAN MACAFEE AND LUCIANO MATINENGO
So, what were/are those “weapons” of reason? Jurisprudence and the law, civil liberties and democratic rights for those denied them, and poetry, literature, art, songs and lyrics, political analysis, political journalism, authentic history, New Democracy and socialism, dedicated teaching with the pedagogy of the oppressed, and grassroots democratic organizing, all permeated with ideas like theirs, for which they knew they would not have been left alone.
Sai was born in 1967 in Amalapuram, a small town in the then East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. He came from a coastal Andhra, Kapu caste, middle-peasant family. Struck by polio at the tender age of five, his mother nurtured him with ever more attention than she gave of herself to his two siblings, carrying him to school and back in her arms. Upon completion of a B.A. (Andhra University), Sai joined the University of Hyderabad in 1987 for an M.A. in English Literature, which he completed in 1989.
During much of the M.A. period, Sai struggled with the debilities of polio, but those ideas of his, for which much later he realized he could not ever expect to be left alone by the state’s repressive apparatus, began to take root upon coming under the influence of two intellectuals who might better be left unnamed. Sai’s other influences were the writings of the prominent Telugu poet and lyricist, Sri Sri, founding president of Virasam, and later, the Kenyan novelist and academic, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Petals of Blood (1977) are particularly notable. Sai got to know the communist-revolutionary poet and singer, Gaddar, and the communist activist, poet, writer, and teacher, Varavara Rao (now one of the BK accused) in 1990, and became a member of Virasam, the Revolutionary Writers Association. His writings appeared in Srijana, a magazine that used to be edited by Varavara Rao and has been considered an off-the-record organ of Virasam. In the pages of Srijana, Sai highlighted forms of knowledge that exclude Dalits and Adivasis from participation in Indian literature.
In May 1992, the CPI(ML) (People’s War), a precursor of the CPI (Maoist), and what the state deemed to be the CPI(ML)(PW)’s “front organizations” were banned, following which the All-India People’s Resistance Forum (AIPRF) was floated. Sai joined the AIPRF and became its state secretary in !993—94. He really came into his own in 1995 when prisoners’ struggles erupted in the jails of Andhra Pradesh. A sizable solidarity movement blossomed outside, and Sai was one of the secretaries of the prisoners’ solidarity committee. He went on to become the national secretary of AIPRF, which successfully organized an international seminar in 1996 on the national question. Then came the Telangana state movement and the historic Warangal Declaration of 1997 which was its pivot, only to be opportunistically appropriated by the Telangana Rashtra Samithi without acknowledgement.
Sai moved to Delhi in 2003 where he registered for a PhD at the University of Delhi and taught English literature at one of its affiliated colleges, the Ram Lal Anand College. By then the Indian state—big business combine had initiated another round of the dynamic of “accumulation by dispossession” or what might be called expropriation (appropriation without equivalent, or just plain robbery) of jal, jangal, zameen (water, forest, land) as part of the process of capitalist development—underdevelopment in the Bastar division of the state of Chhattisgarh. But the Maoist movement there was the biggest impediment to this profit-upon-expropriation process. The classic counterinsurgency strategy centered upon a state-backed, state-financed, state-armed private vigilante force called Salwa Judum to cut off the villagers from the Maoists, with the formation of “strategic hamlets,” was put in place.
As I have written previously:
In Dantewada and Bijapur districts, backed by the security forces, between June 2005 and 2009 Salwa Judum razed 644 villages, hounded the inhabitants into roadside police camps (“strategic hamlets”), and forced many more to escape in order to save life and limb. Around 350,000 Adivasis were displaced—47,000 were forcibly herded into roadside camps, 40,000 fled across the state border into Andhra Pradesh, and 263,000 sought shelters in the forests. Perhaps this was the largest and most brutal displacement so far in independent India in the state’s bid to grab lands for and on behalf of private corporations.
Sai could not remain unmoved and inactive in the face of such brutality unleashed in the process of expropriation and dispossession of the Adivasis from their habitats, unleashed to put cheap natural-resource hoards on the asset side of big-business balance sheets, and thereby create huge capital gains opportunities. On an academic invitation to the U.S. and as part of the International League for People’s Struggles, he spoke about such happenings in India, which in 2008—09 ruffled and angered the then Union Home Minister, P. Chidambaram. In 2011, the Supreme Court declared the practice of the state of arming local Adivasi youth as Special Police Officers, and of funding the recruitment of vigilante groups like Salwa Judum to fight the Maoists, unconstitutional.
On an academic visit to Europe, Sai, once again spoke about the Indian State—big business combine’s diabolical Operation Dispossession, intensified since then with the launch of Operation Green Hunt in September 2009. Following this European visit, the Swedish author, Jan Myrdal, son of Sweden’s most influential twentieth century intellectuals, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, both Nobel Prize winners, came to India in 2010 and travelled to and met the leadership of the CPI (Maoist) in the guerrilla bases in southern Chhattisgarh. (Following which Jan Myrdal authored a book, Red Star Over India: As the Wretched of the Earth Are Rising (2012).) Union Home Minister Chidambaram was more than merely ruffled. Sai’s residence in Delhi University was raided by the police and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on September 12, 2013, on the plea of a theft far away in Aheri in Gadchiroli district. The Sai family’s cell phones, his hard drives, pen drives, and some books were taken away, without sealing. They came again in January 2014 and interrogated Sai. And, then on the basis of the “evidence,” it was claimed that he was working for the Maoist party.
Then on May 9, 2014 (before Narendra Modi assumed prime ministerial office on May 26, 2014) they picked up and arrested Sai as he was returning from college and forcibly took him to far-away Nagpur, and then, accompanied by anti-landmine vehicles with heavily armed commandos, to Gadchiroli. They didn’t seem to bother about the fact that they were handling a differently abled person, because of which—even before Sai faced the harsh conditions of life in jail, including being caged in an Anda cell in solitary confinement, and denial of proper medical care—they had almost semiparalysed his left hand.
On March 7, 2017, in an embedded judgment of the Sessions Court in Gadchiroli, Sai was awarded life imprisonment, framed under sections 10 (penalty for being a member of an unlawful association), 13 (punishment for unlawful activities), 18 (punishment for conspiracy, etc.), 38 (punishment related to membership of a terrorist organization), and 39 (offence related to support given to a terrorist organization) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA) and Section 120 B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). This on the basis of manipulated and fabricated electronic documents—aided by the complicity of a forensic lab—supposedly recovered from his Delhi University residence on September 12, 2013. Moreover, the sanction to prosecute under UAPA was “faulty”; indeed, the sanctioning officers, apart from “non-application of mind,” were said to have even resorted to falsehood under oath. And, the trial was unfair in many respects.
On October 14, 2022, Sai was acquitted by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, but the Supreme Court, in undue haste, suspended the order, sending the case back to the high court for “re-evaluation.” Sai a “grave threat to national security” must have been uppermost in the mind of the learned two-judge bench, headed by Justice Bela Trivedi, who had been the State of Gujarat’s law secretary during Narendra Modi’s tenure as the Chief Minister of Gujarat. But on March 5, 2024, Sai was once again released by the high court, citing, among other things, particularly the verdict of the Gadchiroli Sessions Court as a “failure of justice.”
My brief account of Sai’s life would be incomplete if I were not to mention the two women who loved him and had a profound influence on him, Sai mother, Suryavathi, and his spouse, A. S. Vasantha Kumari. Upon his acquittal and release from jail, in an address to the press in March 2024, Sai also talked about his mother, who died of cancer on August 1, 2020, recalling how lovingly (in Sai’s own words) “she took me in her arms to school” after he was struck by polio at the age of five. Her dream for him was that he serves the people as a teacher; how she “craved to see me before she died.” And yet, the Bombay High Court denied Sai parole to meet his mother when she was about to pass away; and again, denied him parole when she died and he wanted to be at her funeral and for remembrance meetings. And, Vasantha, Sai’s spouse, reminiscing on her response on being asked why she chose Sai to be her life partner, writes: “My answer has always been the same. In this patriarchal society where women are constantly oppressed and treated as second-class citizens, … [Sai has] always tried to go against that thinking. [Sai has always taken it upon himself] … to defend women’s rights, their freedom of expression and treat them with great respect and dignity.” I can picture/imagine Vasantha reading and re-reading the Marxist writer and critic, Telugu novelist and short story writer, Ranganayakamma’s Janaki Vimukti (The Emancipation of Janaki) to Sai as both of them together explore a path to overcoming semi-feudal and capitalist patriarchy in India.
Sai always cared about his fellow prisoners, especially his co-accused, Mahesh Kariman Tirki, Pandu Pora Narote, Hem Keshavdatta Mishra, Prashant Rahi, and Vijay Nan Tirki. Pandu Narote, who lived in a village in Gadchrioli, died in jail of a fever on March 7, 2017. Running a high fever, Narote was not taken to hospital until after Sai and the other prisoners raised an alarm. As related by Sai, Pandu Narote was diagnosed of Swine Flu only after he died.
Sai came to the Nagpur jail with the polio he a had contracted at the age of five, albeit, there must have also been the inevitable slow development of muscular weakness since then. Eight and a half years of imprisonment in “a nineteenth century prison environment” (in his own words) led to the onset of “sixteen serious ailments including that of a life-threatening heart condition, acute pancreatitis, Anterior Horn Cell Syndrome, post-polio syndromes, Brachial plexopathy, etc.” Frankly, the repress apparatus of the state and the failure of the judicial system had a lot to do with his death. Indeed, in October 2020, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led union government with Modi as India’s Prime Minister chose to ignore an urgent call from the United Nation’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) for the immediate release of Sai due to his deteriorating health.
Why did they fear his way so much? The short answer I have given is that he refused to remain unmoved and inactive in the India that that I have described, an India whose deeply exploitative and oppressive social order is crying out for revolutionary change.
References:
- Bernard D’Mello, India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017/Delhi: Aakar Books, 2017).
- Bernard D’Mello, “‘Jal, Jangal, Zameen (Water, Forest, Land)!’: Adivasi Resistance in Historical Perspective,” in Bernard D’Mello and Subhas Aikat (eds.), The Present as History: Late Imperialism (Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications, 2023), pp. 158—225.
- N. Saibaba, Why Do They Fear My Way So Much? Poems and Letters from Prison (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2022).
- Alpa Shah, The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India (Gurugram: Harper Collins, 2024).