La Cause du Peuple (France) – India: Professor GN Saibaba, great democrat and defender of people’s rights, has died

We hereby publish an unofficial translation of an article published by La Cause du Peuple.

Professor GN Saibaba died on Saturday October 12, 2024 from complications of a medical surgery.

At 58 years, this great Indian intellectual, more than 90% disabled, had become over the last ten years one of the number one enemies of the old Indian State which harassed him by all means.

In 2014, this university professor was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for alleged links to the Communist Party of India (Maoist), as he represented a major democratic organization. The prosecution was never able to prove alleged crimes committed by GN Saibaba.

Despite this, he was imprisoned and tortured, even though he had not been tried and was already using a wheelchair due to his disability.

He spent 10 years behind bars before being released in March 2024, fully acquitted. Upon his release, he held a press conference in New Delhi and stated: “I was not able to see my mother one last time before she died because I was denied parole. This is a denial of fundamental human rights. My mother died while I was in prison. A disabled child since birth, my mother raised me with the greatest care. She brought me to school in her arms so I could get an education.”

Despite his polio-related disability, he was in good health when he entered prison. When he came out, his whole body and mind had been tortured by the old Indian State: “All the parts and organs of my body are in a critical state. I can no longer eat or digest. Apart from a prolonged heart condition, in prison I developed hypertension, paraplegia, kyphoscoliosis of the spine, cellular and nerve diseases, acute pancreatitis, stones in the gallbladder and a cyst in the brain.”


Saibaba said: “The prison authorities failed to provide me treatment even though on several occasions my heart rate dropped to such an extent that doctors suggested I would not survive. My hands and muscles stopped working due to muscle damage several times over the years. Despite knowing that I had polio, which mainly affects the legs, I was dragged by my legs and attacked. You can see my swollen legs even after 10 years.”

He added: “I was taken to the public hospital when, in protest, I gave up my medicine and food for ten days. But no treatment was given to me, they only gave me painkillers.”

His death is not accidental, it is the result of the relentlessness of reactionary repression on a man, a slow murder where one executes while letting him die, so they have no blood on his hands. But the people are not fooled, and know the real cause of GN Saibaba’s death: his fierce resistance against the ruling classes of his country and imperialism that feeds them.

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