India: Arunaruna Johars to Comrade GN Saibaba
We hereby publish an unofficial translation of a press release published by the Revolutionary Writers’ Association on the death of GN Saibaba.
Arunaruna Joharlu to Comrade G. N. Saibaba, Man of the World Revolution and Anti-Imperialist People’s Movement, Poet, Intellectual!
With his spirit of defiance to this State, let us stop Operation Kagaar with broad united action!
Let us bring forward the New Democratic Revolution against the Hindutva corporatist forces!
Comrade GN Saibaba, a well-known revolutionary intellectual, poet, people’s movement leader and member of the Revolutionary Writers’ Association, passed away at Nims Hospital, Hyderabad at 8.36 pm on Saturday, October 12, due to severe illness. He was against the Operation Green Hunt announced by the Indian government in 2009 on the tribal peasants. Within the framework of the growing suspicion against him, the police filed an illegal case against him with many false allegations. The government and the courts together sentenced him to life imprisonment in Samphuparivar Kanusannallo. He spent ten years in solitary confinement with fourteen months of bail. He was on the verge of death many times due to severe illness and recovered. During this sentence, the prison authorities and judges treated him and his comrades very cruelly. Pandu Narote, the co-accused in this illegal case, died in jail. There was an enormous support from revolutionaries, democrats and humanitarians all over the world against this case. NIA officials made several vicious attempts to prevent his release on completely baseless charges. However, the case was eventually dismissed and he was released recently.
Saibaba’s political and philosophical beliefs became stronger during his long prison life. Although his body was in ruins, his intellect flourished magnificently. From the solitary prison life, he acquired the wider global human consciousness, struggling spirit, freedom aspirations and liberation concepts. The imagination of the people was expressed by him as immortal poetry. When he was close to death, he defied the state, the system and death and brought forward the aspirations of the people saying ‘I refuse death’. From prison, he declared his commitment to the people’s struggle to overthrow the fascist State and build a humane society. Fascist courts were horrified by his creative revolutionary intellect despite his physical handicap. They declared that it would not be wrong to hang him.
Like Antonio Gramsci, the leader of the Communist Party of Italy as an intellectual and revolutionary in modern world history, Saibaba gave sleepless nights to India’s corporate fascist rulers. Saibaba, like Gramsci, and many poets, writers, revolutionaries from different parts of the world, excellent people’s leaders, intellectuals and artists from Naxalbari period in our country, spent a long life in prison and shortly after his release, he succumbed to a serious illness.
Prof. Saibaba struggled and made poetry in the revolutionary student movement, in the struggle for the release of political prisoners, in the Indian people’s resistance platform of anti-imperialist aspirations, in the unity movement of the liberation struggles of the Indian tribes captivity, in the democratic aspirations of Telangana, in the global struggle against Salwa Judum against the tribals, Operation Green Hunt, in the political campaign of the Indian revolutionary movement at the international level. He was an integral part of all of it. He led the Revolutionary Democratic Front formed in 2005 until his arrest in 2014. In 2012, he was elected as the Assistant Secretary in the All India Congress of that organization in Hyderabad. He worked against the government’s war on mass movements through the ‘Committee Against the War on People’.
Somewhere in Amalapuram on the banks of the Godavari, a physically challenged boy took up revolutionary politics to abolish all the tortures, crimes and sufferings in human life. He possessed a worldly outlook that could connect Telangana, Bastar, the downtrodden tribes of the country, Muslims, Dalits and the working class with the global mankind. He brought such politics to literary practice. He once again proved with his struggling life how wonderful, broad, humane and constructive the revolution is. Saibaba, who has provided political analyses for the people’s movement’s goal, statements and struggle plans through his writings for thirty years, wrote his imaginations, beliefs and predictions even when he was in a miserable prison and on his deathbed in a hospital. He spent his life in prison studying and writing. He was able to overcome the fascist constraint because of his immense love for life, world, people and revolution. He returned that love to the society.
However, his health was completely damaged during his long imprisonment. As the government harassed him and did not provide him with even the minimum medical treatment, his body fell into disrepair. After coming home, he was treated but was not cured. He was in a Hyderabad hospital for a week for a minor operation. His body did not cooperate with the treatment. The heart that listened to the heartbeats of the world’s human beings from the prison stopped working. Saibaba’s death was no coincidence. It was not a natural departure. This is a murder by the Hindutva fascist government. Just as Mussolini’s fascist State murdered Gramsci, Modi’s Hindutva fascist State has murdered Prof. Saibaba.
“What they should do to make me die?
They don’t know
Because I love so much
The sounds of growing grass.”
The death of Saibaba, who declared his desire for freedom of life and revolution, is extremely sad. It is an unfathomable tragedy for his life partner, daughter, blood relatives and all the fighters around the world. But the tears shed for Saibaba cannot be mere sorrow. Even when he was in jail, even when he came out, he longed for the people of this country. He has repeatedly declared that even if his health deteriorates, he would continue working against the Indian government’s war against the tribals in Central India. He called upon the writers, intellectuals and all those struggling with various democratic views to work for the Adivasis. He had the experience of struggling against the Indian State’s war on tribals by using Salwa Judum. There is strength in practice. Similarly, he was also ready to move against the current Operation Kagaar.
Now he is gone. His dream suddenly stopped. We have to honor his will to struggle. We have to prepare ourselves to struggle against the corporate State for the sake of the tribals, for the forest and for the environment. With the spirit of Saibaba, who struggled against Operation Green Hunt and got life sentence, the struggle against Operation Kagaar must be organized. In the current situation where handing over the country to corporations has become a constitutional regime, we have to commit ourselves to a final battle more serious than Green Hunt.
Saibaba said that the struggles of the tribals are not only one, that there are 1,400,000,000 people in India. We must struggle today as a broad democratic united movement with the political consciousness he provided. We must speed up their united struggle against the fascist murderous politics by Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, who are declaring that they will transform this country into a Maoist-free India, a tribal-free India and a corporate India by 2026. The poor working people of this country and the oppressed existential groups have to move against the fascist forces who want to destroy the culture of democratic secular and harmonious coexistence built by hundreds of thousands of years and establish a corporate Hindutva State by 2047.
Currently there is a political polarization between pro-people and anti-people forces across the country. In this, intellectuals and fighters with different pro-people ideas should unite. Movements of different types must build a common front of struggle against fascist destruction. The vast literature especially in Telugu should adopt an anti-fascist nature in the spirit of Saibaba’s poetry. Literary writers should show anti-fascist consciousness without succumbing to trivial awards, self-promotions, fame and state ambitions. It has to come into the people’s life with anti-government consciousness.
‘The music stopped
Creators were kicked out
Poets were poisoned
Historians are buried alive
Scientists have been ignored
Philosophers were hanged
Strangers
Well known people
Lovers and thinkers
They are being shot and murdered”
Saibaba described the current situation from the jail. Writers and intellectuals should take Saibaba as an example in this crisis. Our tribute to Saibaba becomes meaningful only when we struggle against the Brahminical fascist corporate State and its Operation Kagaar. The Revolutionary Writers’ Association pays a humble tribute to him. His goals are still alive.
President
Arasavilli Krishna
Secretary
Rivera