The Maharashtra government has dragged wheelchair-bound former Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba to the Supreme Court for the second time in as many years.
The State’s appeal against Tuesday’s acquittal of Mr. Saibaba, in jail since 2014 for offences under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act linking him with Maoist groups, is a sequel of sorts to a train of events, which began in October 2022.
Also read: Explained | What is the case against former DU professor G.N. Saibaba?
Discharged in 2022
On October 14, 2022, the Bombay High Court discharged Mr. Saibaba in the case for lack of valid sanction under Section 45(1) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 or the UAPA. The State had not lost time. It rushed to the top court the same evening, a Friday.
In an uncharacteristic move, that too concerning a State’s appeal against an order of discharge, the Supreme Court acquiesced to constitute a Special Bench of Justices M.R. Shah (now retired) and Bela M. Trivedi the very next day, a Saturday. The Bench went on to suspend the discharge order of the Bombay High Court Bench of Justices Rohit Deo and Anil Pansare.
The Saturday Bench of the top court, in its October 15, 2022 order, said the “offences are very serious against the sovereignty and integrity of the country”. It surmised that the Division Bench of the High Court had “not at all dealt with and considered anything on the merits of the judgment” passed by the Sessions Court that sentenced Mr. Saibaba to life imprisonment in 2017. The decision of the Supreme Court, which came within 24 hours of the High Court’s discharge of the case against the 57-year-old paraplegic, had attracted criticism.
Months later, on April 19 last year, the Bench set aside the discharge order of the High Court. The Bench had reasoned that an appellate court (High Court) could not delve into the question of a valid sanction once an accused (Saibaba) was convicted by the Sessions Court. It had referred the case back to the Bombay High Court for a fresh round of hearing. It also requested the Bombay Chief Justice to allocate the case to a different Bench of the High Court for the sake of propriety.
However, almost a year later on Tuesday, the judicial gavel again struck in favour of Mr. Saibaba.
A Division Bench of Justices Vinay Joshi and Justice Valmiki S.A. Menezes, to which the case was allocated, agreed with the earlier High Court Bench on the invalidity of the sanction. They concluded that the sanction was both null and void. “The prosecution has failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt the case against the accused persons,” the HC Bench at Nagpur held.
During the October 2022 hearing, the State of Maharashtra had termed Mr. Saibaba the “brain” behind the alleged Maoist activities and his fellow accused were mere “foot soldiers”. The SC Bench had responded orally that “as far as terrorist activities are concerned, the brain plays a very important role… A brain for such activities is very dangerous”.
Mr. Saibaba’s lawyer, senior advocate R. Basant, had stressed that Mr. Saibaba was 90% physically disabled and had led a respectable life as a professor in the Delhi University. A further request to transfer Mr. Saibaba into house arrest on humanitarian grounds was also shot down by the court.
“These requests are coming very frequently from naxals, especially urban naxals… ‘allow me house arrest’... In UAPA offences, accused have to be kept confined. You don’t need to go somewhere to stab someone, you don’t need to go somewhere to shoot someone. House arrest is never an option,” Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for Maharashtra, had reacted.
