Prof GN Saibaba, We Salute You Comrade
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!
We also share some personal reflections from people about Professor GNS Saibaba