All people think about hell. From Dante to Salman Rushdie, from European to Egyptian civilisations, everybody has their very own concept of hell. The Anda cell was simply that,” G N Saibaba recollected in an interview to this newspaper, a number of weeks after he was acquitted by the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay Excessive Courtroom in March. The Courtroom’s two-judge bench had described the previous Delhi College tutorial’s incarceration as a “failure of the justice system”. These phrases resonate poignantly, after Saibaba died on Saturday attributable to problems following a surgical procedure for gallbladder stones, aged 57. His premature dying ought to convey a sobering second for the state which, because the HC identified, did “not comply with due procedures” in charging the English lecturer below stringent UAPA provisions. It ought to hang-out the felony justice system, which heaped indignity on the wheelchair-bound tutorial by detaining him in a cramped egg-shaped concrete enclosure meant for terrorists and high-security convicts. Saibaba’s demise ought to event pressing rethinking and reflection within the judicial system. For, although the HC verdict was a welcome affirmation of the rule of regulation in a constitutional system, it got here after 10 lengthy years. On this interval, the Nagpur Bench had rejected a number of bail pleas by Saibaba’s attorneys, together with these on well being grounds.
Saibaba was arrested in Could 2014 and charged by the Maharashtra authorities with alleged Maoist hyperlinks. He was convicted by a trial court docket, three years later. Nevertheless, in October 2022, a two-judge bench of the Mumbai Excessive Courtroom put aside the order on the bottom that the state didn’t take correct sanction earlier than arresting the tutorial. Barely a number of hours after the decision, nevertheless, the federal government sought a keep. The SC, in a uncommon and strange resolution, constituted a Particular Bench, which sat on a Saturday morning and suspended the Bombay HC ruling. Six months later, in April 2023, one other SC Bench despatched the case again to the Mumbai HC. In March, the HC not solely reiterated its earlier ruling, it additionally got here down closely on the state for failing to again its costs with sound proof. The Maharashtra authorities had argued that below UAPA, the burden of proof shifts to the accused if “sure articles akin to explosives are discovered on the web site of the offence”. However in court docket, it produced solely digital paperwork and some pamphlets. In a powerful rejection of the state’s case, the court docket dominated that merely “downloading materials concerning the philosophy of Naxalism” and even “sympathising” with the ideology mustn’t invite arrest below UAPA. It dismissed the allegations as “obscure”.
As Saibaba advised this paper, he “misplaced far more than the ten years” he spent in jail. He talked of the ache of not assembly his mom earlier than she handed away. Delhi College’s Ram Lal Anand Faculty terminated his companies and Saibaba’s medical problems turned extra extreme. Immediately, when Saibaba isn’t any extra, the judiciary could be failing its constitutional position if it doesn’t discover methods to right a system through which laborious legal guidelines are invoked indiscriminately and, all too often, justice is denied via delay. It’s, sure, a matter of the citizen’s life and dying.
