Who awaits us in heaven or hell is one of the enduring mysteries of mythology. The issue figures in the “Swargarohana Parva” in the Mahabharata, which mentions Yudhishthira’s dismay at Duryodhana’s presence in heaven.

On October 9, Ratan Tata died. Three days later, on October 12, G.N. Saibaba died. It will be preposterous to speculate who went to heaven but the managers of the imaginary purgatory must have reserved a place of pride for the media organisations that treated the two deaths with markedly different yardsticks. Reams of newsprint were devoted to the coverage of Tata’s death, life and times. The death of Saibaba was reported dutifully — ‘dutifully’ is the operative word, if not a euphemism for indifference. Few newspapers devoted space to substantial discussions on the need to institutionalise mechanisms for easier and swifter compensation for malicious prosecution.

The exigencies of deadlines often stand in the way of adequate coverage if deaths take place late in the evening. The news of Tata’s passing broke well past 11 pm while Saibaba had breathed his last a little after 8.30 pm. So deadlines could not have been the deciding factor in the discrimination in death.

Not that discrimination caught up with Saibaba only in his death. He was a victim of that scourge multiple times in his life — and every single day that he spent in the egg-shaped Anda Cell prison. “I was in the same cell for eight and a half years without a wheelchair. It was a daily struggle to use the toilet, take a bath, or even fetch myself a glass of water,” the former assistant professor of English, who was dismissed from the faculty while he was in jail, had said after he was acquitted in March this year.

Saibaba was arrested for alleged links with Maoists by the Maharashtra police in 2014 when the Congress was in power, and the Bharatiya Janata Party ran both the Central and state governments when the sanction to prosecute him under the UAPA was granted in 2015. Saibaba was acquitted twice by the Bombay High Court. The first acquittal was suspended by the Supreme Court, which met on a Saturday to do so, but another bench of the high court acquitted him afresh. This time, the Supreme Court declined to stay the acquittal when the Maharashtra government moved the top court against the high court order. “Prima facie, we find that the [high court] judgment is very well-reasoned. Since on an earlier occasion, this court had interfered, we will have to honour... The parameters of interference with acquittal orders are very limited,” the Supreme Court bench had said this March.

Contrast this with the eulogies that most of the political and executive leadership showered on Tata — in life as well as in death. The accolades included the Padma Vibhushan. Some commentators have already proposed that the Bharat Ratna be conferred on Tata posthumously.

At some point, however unpleasant it might be, the nation must ask this question: between Tata and Saibaba, for whom have we secured some of the most cherished values enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution?

For whom, between Tata and Saibaba, did We, the People of India, secure JUSTICE, social, economic and political?

For whom, between Tata and Saibaba, did We, the People of India, secure LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief...?

For whom, between Tata and Saibaba, did We, the People of India, secure EQUALITY of status and of opportunity?

Tata, indisputably and overwhelmingly, ticks the boxes.

In a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, to whom does the country owe a deeper debt of gratitude?

Tata did help consolidate and take his business group to dizzying heights and he indeed was a picture of grace in a world with its fair share of vulgar and uncouth worshippers of wealth. In short, a nice guy.

But a democracy needs more than just nice guys to correct itself. Saibaba was the Little Guy who struck fear in the mighty establishment even before it had dropped its pretences and bared its 56-inch chest. He did so against unimaginable odds.

If Tata did well, he was born to do so — the die already cast by his birth into a family carrying a surname that was a synonym for wealth in India. Some observers have insisted that the last name played no role in his ascent within the Tata group. But dynasty is indeed an asset in boardrooms. It rarely becomes the prime minister’s target as it does when he refers to his political rivals.

One of the schools Tata went to boasts alumni such as Akash Ambani, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Shashi Tharoor, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Rishi Kapoor, according to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia does not mention the school where Saibaba, born in a poor peasant family and who had permanent post-polio paralysis as a child, studied. “My mother, despite being uneducated, made… sure that I got educated. She would take me to school in her arms,” Saibaba had recalled earlier this year. He was denied emergency bail during the death of his mother.

Saibaba spent nearly a decade in inhuman conditions in prison on charges of links with a banned organisation. A similar charge was levelled against some officials of the Tata Group under the watch of Ratan Tata. Not many may like to recall the details of the ‘Tata Tapes’ controversy but the allegations involved extending medical assistance to a member of a banned outfit. The Tatas said they were not aware of the real identity of the recipient of their medical aid scheme. Some Tata executives were booked.

Consider what Saibaba said about the police’s visit to his Delhi home. “[T]he policemen dragged me by my left hand as a result of which my left arm remains swollen to date. After several delays when I was taken to the hospital, the doctors told me that it was almost impossible to revive the muscular and nervous system,” Saibaba had recalled. Saibaba’s lawyer and Dalit rights activist, Surendra Gadling, was eventually imprisoned as an undertrial in the Elgaar Parishad case.

It is interesting to recall how the Tatas battled the aspersions cast on the business group by the then Assam chief minister, Prafulla Kumar Mahanta. “On a Tuesday in October 1997, the south Mumbai residence of lawyer Ram Jethmalani buzzed with frantic activity. His son, Mahesh Jethmalani, a prominent city lawyer, had just arrived. Joining him were middle-aged Arun Jaitley, one of the country’s most accomplished advocates at the time... Also present was the ‘crisis junkie’ Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing. Tagging along with Nusli Wadia was none other than his childhood friend, Ratan Tata, the man at the helm of India’s biggest industrial empire, stuck in a crisis,” the India Today magazine reported.

It was Entitled India circling the wagons.

No prizes for guessing who won the battle. Mahanta eventually buried the hatchet with the Tatas, and several observers would cite ‘compulsions’, often with some intelligence agencies in the loop, that forced the hand of businesses operating in certain parts of the Northeast then. “In the end, Ratan Tata and the Tata Group emerged from this crisis with their reputation intact,” the India Today article concluded.

Saibaba did not emerge from the Anda Cell unscathed, in spite of being acquitted twice. His life was destroyed.

The admirers of Tata are certain to cite the number of jobs he apparently created, the number of vehicles he sold and the sweep of his philanthropy. But such pieces of statistics are meaningless when fundamental freedoms are in peril.

If the Constitution is the yardstick, the nation owes a deeper debt of gratitude to Citizen Saibaba than to Citizen Tata.

The retired economics professor, Arun Kumar, wrote in The Wire: “... Democracy is the bedrock of India. Did Ratan Tata strive to strengthen it? One did not hear him take a stand on the many critical issues that have plagued the nation. During the Mumbai riots in 1993, Tata helped out, but during the Gujarat riots in 2002, there was silence. On the decline of the institutions of democracy and the deteriorating communal situation there was no public comment.

“The growing use of black money in elections, the decline of standards in legislatures and parliament, the functioning of the judiciary and the attack on autonomy of educational institutions did not impel him to react.”

The regime never feared Tata, regardless of his wealth and influence. It had no reason to.

But it is terrified of the Little Guys: Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, Stan Swamy, Pandu Pora Narote, G.N. Saibaba...

The Little Guys did not have a battery of lakhs-an-hour lawyers defending them, a phalanx of suits protecting them, and a cackle of journalists singing paeans to them. Yet, they had to be silenced — with murder or with imprisonment.

Tata had to see two-wheelers with families drenched in rain for him to realise India needed an affordable car. Saibaba did not need that revelation to fight for the rights of the marginalised and the oppressed, including Dalits and Adivasis.

Nice guys are okay to share cucumber sandwiches with, and we can convince ourselves that we all are modern-day Yudhishthiras. But don’t be sure whom you are going to meet in heaven.

R. Rajagopal is editor-at-large, The Telegraph