GN Saibaba: As an Academic, I lost ten years. Who will give it back to me?
The following is the transcript of the presentation given by GN Saibaba at the public meeting organized by IAFN, 'Report Card on Academic Freedom' on 06 April 2024 at Jawahar Bhavan, New Delhi
I am very happy to be here with all of you after such a long time. For me, it is like homecoming. I am really thankful to Nandini Ji for calling me here so I have the opportunity to see and meet you all after such a long time.
There is one thing which is circulating: ‘after ten years, justice delayed but justice given’. In this context I would like to say a few words. As an academic, what I have lost in the last ten years, can not be given back. Who will give it back to me? I am not asking for the years that are lost.
When the Maharashtra Police raided our university residence, it took away certain electronic devices. What was there in those devices? First of all, twenty years of my research work. There were various archival materials. I had gone to various archives and collected them. The material was on literature and certain interesting texts and conversations which was very important for me.
What else was there? My research papers and books. I was about to publish. Book publishers were in conversation with me to finalise some books which were being edited by the publishers. My students’ assignments and term papers, who submitted it to me in their pen drives. Some people gave me their papers to provide comments. All of them are lost. Some people might ask that you can get them back from court. It will take years. My lawyer, Surendra Gadling, has been in jail for more than five years. Before I was convicted, he had applied for copies. We got two copies of the drives. One for my lawyer and one for me. We tried to open them. Only mutilated materials, nothing was there. We went back to the court and they said that it was sent for a forensic report. They subjected it to several tests and we can not do anything about it. This is all lost.
Not only the serious academic materials, Vasantha used to collect our family photographs of all the events from over twenty-five years. All the photographs are lost. My daughter used to collect various films from all over the world. All was lost. Certain MPhil dissertations that were given to me for reading were also lost. Of course, they were there in the university so nobody was affected.
Like all writers, we zealously protect our work. Particularly the research work. It is part of the body and heart. So after years when one receives mutilated parts, how does one feel about it?
Apart from that, I wanted to say only two more things. This is all lost. We can’t get it even if we go to the Supreme Court. We tried consulting software experts but it was deliberately mutilated. They know where this person would be hurt most.
During the arguments in the sessions court and high court, one of the arguments followed by a very prominent public prosecutor was that in the videos and also in my writings, academic and popular, I use two terms which indicate that I am a terrorist.
What are these two terms? The argument was that I used this term very frequently in conferences and my papers, ‘brahmanism’. “He was talking against brahmanism so it is an indication that he is with the terrorists”. And the second term which he found very serious and also incriminating was ‘imperialism’. It was repeated several times in the arguments.
I had no opportunity to explain. I wrote a note to my lawyer to send it across. The note explained that when I was talking about brahmanism, I was not talking about individuals, I was talking about a system. And the context in which they showed the video was in response to a question asked at a conference about the JNU student Naveen Babu who wrote his MPhil thesis on varna to caste. They did not show the entire answer. The prosecution was playing with the minds of the judges. The question was when did brahmanism as an institution emerge and whether the varna system changed into caste system in that period. I wanted to say that we are not talking about individual brahmins. It was about the institution. But of course, there was no opportunity to clarify that before the judges.
And about imperialism. They said “Today it has become very fashionable among academics to talk about imperialism and this man has been talking about it all the time…actually only terrorists speak this and the terrorists among academics speak this”. This was the argument provided by a very well known senior lawyer who acted as a public prosecutor.
When we lose the ten years of our tenure and lose all the work we have done as a teacher and researcher, it is like I lost a person very close to my heart in my family. The entire work which I could come back and check was not there.
I will conclude my remarks now. I am sure it is not only me who has been affected by this. We are talking about academic freedom today. I don't know if even during Emergency (things like) this were done to the academics. Even after my arrest and conviction, I have never left my work in jail. I continued to teach in the jail even though the authorities tried to prevent that. I am ready to share with you that some adivasi boys who did not know the alphabets in Hindi or English, they passed out of IGNOU courses and took degrees. In these seven years, I continued to read and write in my field. At least I hope to publish now what I have done in jail in my own field of research. I have at least one feeling that I defeated the jail work by continuing with my academic work.
Transcribed by Suyog Raghuvanshi
