‘This is their attempt to silence him’: Umar Khalid reaches five years in Indian jail without trial | India

“TIn fact, something that makes you feel like a place of captivity, a place between life and death, ”Umar Khalid wrote in June with a fluttering letter behind his fifth year.

Like Khalid, he understands very little about the prison’s purgatory. For five years – since the arrest of a ruthless terrorist law in September 2020 – he remained the leading political prisoner of India for a strong symbol of systematic oppression of the opposition under the dominant Hindu nationalist regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

This month, the Supreme Court of Delhi was the last court to reject the guarantee satisfaction of Khalid and alleged joint conspirators. The bail case is now with the Supreme Court where a hearing was postponed on Friday. Meanwhile, Delhi was detained in his name without a prisoner in his fame Tihar prison.

Khalid, a Muslim and leftist activist, is accused of being a key conspiracy in Delhi rebellions in February 2020, where violent religious gangs ramps in the north west of the city. Most of 53 people killed in the rebellions were Muslims and several mosques were burned to the ground.

Before his arrest, Khalid emerged as one of the faces of an anti -government protest movement after a modern government’s lawsuit of citizenship, which was seen as a discriminator to Muslims in late 2019. The exploding protests were the first widespread challenge to the Modi regime and were greeted with brute force by the state. He was killed by dozens of police fire and the activists were detained and tortured.

In the following months, most of the leading protest organizers and voices began to be accused of terrorist acts, while Modi’s Bharatia Janata party, who directly calls for violence in Delhi just before the uprising eruption.

Khalid rejected all the charges and received examination and criticism of lawyers and human rights groups against him and other Muslim activists mentioned in police charges. Most of the case against him is concerned with the allegation of secret meetings revealed by unapproved witnesses and membership of some WhatsApp groups that he has not issued any message. When the rebellions took place, Khalid Delhi was not in Delhi, and the speech, where he was accused of making the uprisings, was more than 1000 miles in Maharashtra.

Here, in the camera that Khalid said to a crowd: ız We will not respond strongly to violence. We will not respond to hatred with hatred. If they spread hate, we will respond to him with love. ”

In a series of Delhi rebellion, Delhi Police Found by judges He produced evidence, created imaginary witnesses, and forced the witnesses to record statements dictated by civil servants. Delhi police did not respond to these claims.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a friend who wrote a comprehensive friend about Khalid’s case, said that the Kafkaesque situation showed that the process was “the process is punishment here”.

Sengupta, “The message he aims to give is open: Today, if you are a Muslim in India and dare to stand against your rights, peace and disgusting, you will be persecuted,” he said.

In a joint statement published on the fifth anniversary of Khalid’s detention last week, the international Amnesty International and the other six Human Rights organizations condemned that he was “unjustly detained without trial ve and asked him to be released immediately.

Khal The long -term persecution of Khalid, who died of starvation from justice, exemplifies the rail of justice because justice in India mocked international human rights principles, ”he said. Expression, association and peaceful Assembly. “

Before his arrest, Khalid had made a thorn next to the Modi government that came to power in 2014. Delhi’s open oral student activist at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was vocal against Modi’s anti-Muslims. In 2016, after a protest against the death penalty, after attracting the attention of the national media, Khalid was arrested and was detained in briefly the accusations of Sadırıdion.

It was also the beginning of his 41 -year -old partner Banojyotsna Lahiri, a PhD student at Jnu, and was described by the Indian media, which routinely described it as “national ,, a“ targeted hate campaign against Khalid. In 2018, two men went to an armed Delhi event and tried to kill Khalid as a gift for India.

Lahiri said he expected Khalid’s arrest to arrive in 2020 and even recorded a video in advance. However, he said that he would be kept as a alleged terrorist five years later and that he had never foresee that he rejected his right to bail.

“Hope everything that the government hates,” Lahiri said. “He speaks about the Muslim, intellectual, oppressed, clearly anxiety, fearless and unfavorable opposition. This is the attempt to silence it, but it will not work.

Lahiri visits him in prison every week and insists on keeping the conversation cheerful, and laughing together even as he passes through a deadly Covid wave that sweeps from prison and in the extreme heat of Delhi. To feed the appetite of reading Kazakh, he usually carries Tomes for him, and now he predicted that he had read more than 300 books in prison – everything from Russian classics to contemporary Indian fiction and political biographies.

Every week, a 30 -minute video calls with his family in Delhi are allowed and patch the sisters living abroad regularly. Orum I want to say that Umar does not regret or did not break the spirit of the years in prison, Syd said his father Syd Qasim Rasol Ilyas, recently.

For Khalid, in his last writings, although he acknowledged that “feeding hope in prison is a risky task ,, he sometimes surprised how I survived in the same limited area”. However, thanks to the consolation and flexibility of the prisoners of the books, he insisted on ım I am mostly peaceful ”.