Yes, my gut instinct is telling me that Handa was assassinated. There are many subtle ways to do something like that. He's a probable target for the obvious reasons of even usually accurately, verbally attacking power in fascist times. He's a practical target because he's older, has a stressful role (even if self chosen) sits a lot and is quite overweight. Californians, unlike New Yorkers and people from much of the rest of the country, are very ageist and expect an overweight guy like him to just up and die. Here in California, another thought in the collective mind questioning why he would now die, will not occur. Plenty of plausible deniability for assassinating entities exists as cover for anyone who would do something like that to Mr. Handa. He definitely provided a motive with his pointed, sometimes verging on personal but never baselessly ad hominem, attacks on people not used to being questioned after 30 years of Reaganomics and dumbing down. He had lots of enemies who work very hard to maintain the Reaganomics status quo of sticking it to working people (budgetary poor mouthing), all the while never increasing taxes on the richest individuals or corporations (parasites). I know of absolutely no one who put their money where their mouth is more than Sanjiv did in any form of activism. I've been politically involved for the better part of three decades. He could have just had a heart attack, stroke, aneurysm, whatever, which, of course, could be the case. But, was there anything to help such an outcome along? Handa, though he had a small hooptie auto, walked miles on many days of the week, which leads me to believe that he was not a candidate for sudden onset heart disease, recent illness not withstanding, though he may have suffered from high blood pressure that politics, especially the modern disappointing nature of politics at nearly every level, will exacerbate. Also, Handa, very poor without adequate access to services as far as we all know, is actually expressing a longevity that is normal for the poor and stressed out increasingly in the U.S. Stress of poverty kills and also causes Type II diabetes. Did he have this? If he did, it's very easy to die from missing an injection or pill and one could die in one's sleep. Yes, there is lots of plausible deniability if anyone did assassinate him by any number of subtle means. When full martial law finally fully lowers gloweringly over us all, anyone who is like him will be summarily executed, tortured and imprisoned--just taken somewhere remote and shot. We even have nearby settings that could be qualified as desert. Friends in Tunisia and my professor from Egypt told me that this was often the outcome, along with lengthy political imprisonments and torture, for any outspoken individual who was even mildly but publically critical of the regimes in place--a stray comment could result in assassination, under Mubarak and before the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Damned interesting stuff. Who’s going to help hold back the fascism now in Oakland? I will definitely miss Mr. Handa very much. His faults with blemishes and all were absolutely irrelevant proportionate to the good he did daily. He wasn't just an interesting character (enough for me to miss someone when they're gone), but a valuable member of the community committed every day to making things better. His energies were directed against those most responsible. In fact, he did not lie or exaggerate. The criminal at the top of any extant hierarchy, are by the nature of said hierarchies all execrable prevaricating criminals in system functional terms. Desley Brooks might be an exception locally. The system is broken and needs full overhaul to create directly democratic government structures, fully responsive to the public with full transparency that Handa is correct, we utterly lack in Oakland. Handa rocked whilst he lived! I'm certain that City Council meetings will be far less eventful and the blood pressure of the criminals mainly who make up the City Council, whomever they are under this actually non-representative Republic-based system, will grow regressively and in a cancerously criminal way without having Mr. Handa or anyone like him to hold filthy business-first politicos feet to the flame. My approach to criticizing power (truth to power) in person is much more thuggish. I would like to learn to be more subtle, and he was subtle in being so specific and concise in his criticisms. He was a miracle of a person. He was able to keep up with all the ballooning interlacing layers of distortion inevitably produced by a predatory, non-representative, exploitative leadership support system. He, where are the rest of us, kept up with a pile of figurative excrement so filthy, so complex, old, and stale that it would drive most of us to drink first. Again, I will truly miss this great thought warrior, Mr. Handa. You have honored Athena and the Goddess in General. May your future lives be rewarding.

P.S: I could fathom being wrong if Sanjiv was eating a lot of radionuclide contaminated food (tap water, tuna, seafood like sushi, milk, cheese, potatoes and other root crops--it should be assumed that at least these products are very strongly contaminated with radionuclides and this contamination will worsen because Fukushima has not stopped emitting radionuclides for 9 months and going strong, as Chernobyl did stop after only one week for comparison. If he was ingesting a lot of those things and had a precondition of Type II diabetes, heart disease of whatever kind, poor eliminatory systems--i.e., Chrons, then, previous studies from Chernobyl show that one could die suddenly and out of the blue from a sudden heart stoppage without fowl play. See the documentary (short and easily found online) "Chernobyl Heart" Epidemic heart disease and cancer rates post Chernobyl in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, all formerly, U.S.S.R. were predicted, expected and are occurring, 25 years after the last fissioning of the now glassified corium from the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident. FS

Frank Snapp commented at Wed, 28 Dec at 1:47pm
Sanjeev was not a "gadfly"; he was a warrior, a dragon. Neither was he a "mukraker". Mukraking is a behavior of slinging figurative mud about personal, not political backgrounds, valid or not, by politicians during political campaigns. English is a flexible language with exceptional and flexible figurative and metaphorical uses; but, Sanjiv was not a politician. He was politically aware and politically active as a citizen. He was that preciously and bizarrely rare gemlike journalist these days, the journalist who tells the truth whatever the consequences. Telling the truth is not muckraking. Communicating the truth and working hard to cover big pictures is not being a "gadfly". To whomever is writing about Mr. Handa or opining about Mr. Handa, if you, the writer does not have the big-picture reality evaluation skills of Mr. Handa, this is not a reason to minimize the value of an individual like Mr. Handa. He is what our founding fathers should have been like, but they were not like Mr. Handa. Founding "fathers" in our filthy martial, non-representative patriarchy were slave holding equivalents of moder parasitic billionaires. He, to contrast, is the face that informs all change that benefits we non-billionaires. May similarly irritating individuals rise...and they will.

Sanjiv will be missed by those who value open government and any fan of Oakland City Council Kabuki theater. My ex is a social justice attorney and would watch hours of OCC meetings on public access tv. I spent more time with his fabulous OCC obsession and classic comb-over than I would care to admit.

His preparation and encyclopedic memory were simultaneously amazing and painfully tedious.

I hope his spirit is peaceful, but if it wants to hang around and haunt the clown car that is Oakland City government....