Article 21 of the Constitution stipulates that “no person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law”. The death of former professor of Delhi University Prof. G.N. Saibaba at the age of 55, months after he was acquitted by the Bombay high court in a case charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act following eight years of incarceration, comes across as a case of how the State can use the procedures established by law to deprive a person of their liberty first, and life later.
Prof. Saibaba was first arrested in 2014 on the charge of being an associate of the banned outfit CPI (Maoist). He was sentenced to life in prison by the trial court in 2017 on the strength of documents seized.
What happened after the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court acquitted him of the UAPA charges upon finding that the prosecuting agencies had not complied with the mandates of the law points to the complicity of the judiciary in the denying people the rights conferred on them by Article 21. The Supreme Court sat on a weekend for a special sitting to stop the release from jail of a person who suffered from 90 per cent disability and was wheel-chair bound, and ordered the high court to revisit the case “since the charges against him were serious and grave”.
The apex court was making a mockery not only of Article 21 but of every concept of contemporary jurisprudence by that order. The high court, which revisited the case as per the Supreme Court order, acquitted him, again, both on technical and legal grounds; it found that the prosecution had not complied with the mandate of the law and that it possessed no real evidence to substantiate the terror charges it had slapped Prof. Saibaba with.
The Indian State is guilty not only of causing the deaths of Prof. Saibaba and Fr Stan Swamy, another victim of procedures, but also of causing grievous hurt to the principles that lay the foundations of the republic and of the Constitution by stifling these voices of dissent.
