“IT IS ONLY BY CHANCE that I came out of prison alive,” GN Saibaba said, at his first press briefing after his release from Nagpur Central jail on 7 March. The 57-year-old former Delhi University professor also mentioned the inhumane treatment and torture he had faced for nearly ten years in prison. Saibaba, who is wheelchair-bound and over ninety-percent handicapped, was confined to the same cell for over eight years and deprived of a wheelchair. “It was a daily struggle to use the toilet, take a bath or even fetch myself a glass of water,” he said. “The prison doesn’t have a single ramp for people like me.” Saibaba was also denied medical care, despite suffering two bouts of COVID-19 and one of swine flu. Now, only half of his heart is functioning.
On 5 March, the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court acquitted Saibaba, deeming his decade-long incarceration under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act illegal. It rejected the charges against him and his co-accused—of supporting a banned organisation to overthrow the Indian government—and held that this detention was unsustainable in law. The judgment validated the constitutional protection of free speech and academic freedom. However, the inhumane treatment meted out to Saibaba and others under the UAPA raises numerous troubling questions about India’s legal institutions and judicial proceedings. “The only institution left to be relied upon in the country, the judiciary,” Saibaba told Frontline, “has also been put to the test in this case.” His arrest, in May 2014, was, in many ways, a precursor for what was to follow and created a template for subsequent cases.
On 5 April, just one month after Saibaba’s release, the 66-year-old former Nagpur University professor Shoma Sen walked out of the Byculla women’s prison. She was granted bail by the Supreme Court nearly six years after she was arrested, on 6 June 2018. The judges concluded that they “do not find prima facie commission or attempt to commit any terrorist act” by Sen in terms of the UAPA. “We have all waited for this moment for far too long,” her daughter Koel wrote on social media.
Another month later, on 14 May, the 70-year-old journalist and human-rights activist Gautam Navlakha was also granted bail by the Supreme Court. He was arrested four years earlier, on 14 April 2020. “Years of our life have been snatched from us as prisoners awaiting trial, which itself will take years to conclude,” Navlakha wrote in a letter after his release. “What disturbs me, as a democratic rights activist, is that justice appears as a distant dream.”