All humans imagine hell. From Dante to Salman Rushdie, from European to Egyptian civilisations, everyone has their own idea of hell. The Anda cell was just that,” G N Saibaba recollected in an interview to this newspaper, a few weeks after he was acquitted by the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court in March. The Court’s two-judge bench had described the former Delhi University academic’s incarceration as a “failure of the justice system”. These words resonate poignantly, after Saibaba died on Saturday due to complications following a surgery for gallbladder stones, aged 57. His untimely death should bring a sobering moment for the state which, as the HC pointed out, did “not follow due procedures” in charging the English lecturer under stringent UAPA provisions. It should haunt the criminal justice system, which heaped indignity on the wheelchair-bound academic by detaining him in a cramped egg-shaped concrete enclosure meant for terrorists and high-security convicts. Saibaba’s demise should occasion urgent rethinking and reflection in the judicial system. For, though the HC verdict was a welcome affirmation of the rule of law in a constitutional system, it came after 10 long years. In this period, the Nagpur Bench had rejected several bail pleas by Saibaba’s lawyers, including those on health grounds.
As Saibaba told this paper, he “lost much more than the 10 years” he spent in jail. He talked of the pain of not meeting his mother before she passed away. Delhi University’s Ram Lal Anand College terminated his services and Saibaba’s medical complications became more severe. 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 is, yes, a matter of the citizen’s life and death.
