DU, JNU students protest arrest of wheel-chair bound professor

Around 50 students from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University staged a protest outside Maharashtra Sadan in Delhi on Saturday demanding immediate release of DU professor GN Saibaba who was arrested by Maharashtra Police for his alleged link with Maoists.

‘The government is hell bent on suppressing voices. How can a 90 per cent physically challenged person be treated like this in the country? He is sympathetic towards tribal people who are facing tyranny and brutality of the state, but he is not anti-national. His arrest is denial of the right to speak,’ said Rajkishore, general secretary of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF) in Delhi. 

Saibaba is currently deputy secretary of RDF, an organisation which claims to advocate alternative politics. ‘We are for an alternative development model which comes from the grass-roots. The present system of development has completely failed the tribal people and alienated them from the mainstream,’ contended Varavara Rao, president of RDF. ‘We are not anti-national. We support revolutionary democracy to replace parliamentary democracy,’ he said, emphasising that parliamentary democracy has failed tribals.

The demonstrators also handed over a memorandum to the resident commissioner of Maharashtra Sadan, which was addressed to Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan. In the memorandum, the students said that the arrest is an attempt to ‘frame Saibaba’ and condemned the ‘illegal’ detention. 

The name of Saibaba cropped up after the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru University student Hemant Mishra who had claimed before the probe agencies that he was acting as a courier between the professor and Maoists holed up in Abujmad forests in Chhattisgarh, official sources said. 

The DU professor was arrested on Friday morning on charges of being a member of the banned organisation, CPI-Maoist, providing logistics and helping in recruitment for the group, DIG of Gadchiroli, Ravindra Kadam had said.