‘Humanity is a privilege’: Umar Khalid on his six years in an Indian jail without trial | India

P.Rison is hardest at sunset. As thousands of inmates incarcerated in Delhi’s most notorious prison are thrown out of their cells and forced into the dank courtyard until darkness falls, prisoner number 626714 feels the punitive fear beginning to mount.

But the prisoner, better known as Umar Khalid, discovered that another political prisoner, recently exiled in a camp thousands of kilometers from India, had written the same sentiment more than 150 years ago.

“Even Dostoevsky talks about this mood at sunset in his prison memoirs,” Khalid said in his first interview since going to prison in 2020. “I think maybe it’s because your life is starting to sink in from spending another day in captivity.”

There are few people in India who do not know Khalid’s name outside the walls of Tihar prison. Over the past decade, he rose to prominence, first as a fierce student activist and then as the face of the anti-government protests that swept the country in 2019; This was the first major challenge to the Narendra Modi government. By September 2020, he was arrested and jailed as a terrorist, accused of being the “principal conspirator” in the deadly religious riots in Delhi and conspiring to bring about “violent regime change”.

TV presenters still mention his name on nightly news programs, calling him a Muslim terrorist and anti-nationalist. Left-wing activists chant his name at protests and wear T-shirts bearing his face.

For rights groups and activists, Khalid has become the epitome of the crackdown on dissent under Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has been in power for 12 years and has been accused of weaponizing the judicial system to go after dissidents.

Khalid, a Muslim and left-wing rights activist, has been a particularly harsh critic of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda, which aims to transform India from a secular country into a Hindu nation. He accused the Modi government of fueling harassment and persecution of the country’s 200 million Muslims, as well as other minorities. The BJP has repeatedly denied all allegations of religious discrimination.

International human rights groups have widely condemned Khalid’s detention without trial for nearly six years as unjust. The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, sent him a handwritten note to express his solidarity, prompting an angry response from the Indian government. The BJP maintains that India’s judicial system is independent and that Khalid’s trial is not linked to politics.

Due to conditions of incarceration, Veli was unable to meet Khalid for this interview, so questions and answers were relayed through family and friends.

Faced with allegations he denied for years and dealing with a propaganda machine beyond his control, the 38-year-old actor admits that it has been difficult to fully unravel the incident.

“When you are reduced to just an image, negative or positive, it becomes difficult to maintain not only your humanity, but sometimes even your sanity,” he said. “Even those who sympathize with you or portray you as someone greater than yourself forget that I am a human being with my share of vulnerabilities, fears and flaws, and that these long years in prison have destroyed my mind and body and exacerbated all the anxieties inside me.”

But the years he spent in prison did not soften his stance towards the Modi government. As Hindu nationalism becomes the dominant political force in India, Khalid describes his dismay at “the normalization and glorification of hate speech and genocidal language.”

Today, he said, “India’s process of becoming a post-truth society is almost complete.”

We agreed not to discuss his legal situation or his circumstances in Tihar, but Khalid made it clear that remaining silent was not an option.

“Even from your fellow prisoners with whom you share meals, you hear mutterings about yourself, calling you a terrorist behind your back. This propaganda dehumanizes me in the eyes of people,” he said. “Humanity is a privilege not granted to people like me.”

‘Silence encourages this regime’

Growing up in the Muslim-majority Jamia Nagar neighborhood in southeast Delhi, Khalid said he witnessed firsthand how the rise of Hindu nationalist politics began to fragment society along religious lines and stripped Muslims of their rights and dignity.

“I grew up in a Muslim ghetto at a time when Muslims were increasingly oppressed, marginalized and demonized,” he said. “It is impossible for a sensitive person not to be affected by all these developments.”

While pursuing his PhD at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Khalid embraced the student policies that evolved at the government-funded institution. But the university rose to prominence when it found itself in the crosshairs of right-wing ideologues seeking to destroy the educational hub long seen as a bastion of left-wing activism, intellectualism and debate.

Following his attendance at a political event at JNU in 2016, Khalid was arrested for sedition after India’s polarized media published explosive headlines condemning him as an “anti-national” threat to the country. From that moment on, Khalid said, “my life was never the same.” The university even tried to prevent him from submitting his doctoral thesis, which he successfully challenged in the high court. It will be published as his own work this month. first bookFractured Communities.

Khalid’s conflict with the BJP government came to a head in 2019 after the government passed a citizenship law that was seen to discriminate against Muslims. JNU campus became the focal point of protests against the law. Hundreds of thousands later marched through Indian cities and towns in one of the first significant political challenges to the Modi regime.

Khalid was one of the key figures of the movement. “We will not meet violence with violence. We will not meet hate with hate,” he told the crowd in his now famous speech. “If they spread hatred, we respond with love.”

The state was unforgiving in its response. The protests were met with deadly police violence, and people associated with the BJP voiced inflammatory anti-Muslim and violent rhetoric. As tensions rose, sectarian riots broke out in Delhi in February 2020. Fueled by online misinformation, Hindu mobs attacked the capital, targeting mosques and those with Muslim names or those who were circumcised. Some Muslims retaliated.

The violence lasted three days and the majority of the 53 people killed were Muslims. But when the Delhi police filed their indictments, no BJP officials were charged and there were very few Hindu rioters. Instead, Khalid, who was 1,000 miles away at the time, was accused of “planning” the riots.

Along with more than a dozen prominent human rights defenders and student activists, he was accused of “plotting communal riots” as a means of coordinating “a pre-planned attack against the nation” through “armed rebellion.”

Khalid described the accusations as “dystopian” but police officers arrived at his parents’ home in Delhi seven months later to arrest him under the country’s most punitive terrorism laws, among other serious charges. Delhi police have since been accused of fabricating evidence and forging witness statements in a growing number of Delhi riots cases. They did not respond to these allegations.

While others named in the same case were released on bail, Khalid’s case remained a poisoned chalice. The judges tasked with granting bail repeatedly delayed, delayed and recused themselves. All of them rejected their applications. The BJP denied any involvement in Khalid’s case but openly welcomed the rejection of his bail requests.

Khalid said the lingering hopes for freedom were “pretty heartbreaking.” “Hope is slowly starting to fade away. And when you have no hope to hold on to, it becomes extremely difficult to survive in prison; it takes a huge toll on you emotionally, mentally and physically.”

He remains in prison while the police investigation continues with no clear conclusion and no trial date in sight.

Khalid does not hold back his disappointment at the failure of the dwindling opposition to Modi to defend the rights of the growing numbers of political prisoners imprisoned in Indian prisons since the BJP came to power. Some died behind bars, including activist Father Stan Swamy.

“I have to say that after six years I feel really disappointed and even lonely,” he said. “This silence of opposition parties, civil society groups, and famous activists who have made a career of supporting popular movements encourages this regime to go after more opponents.”

Nights are the time when Halid finds peace. Back in his cell, as the jingling of the guard’s keys fades, the words written on his wall—quotes spilling from the angry writings in his diary—offer him some solace before falling asleep. Next to a picture of anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh, Khalid scrawled his famous words: “I am that mad soul that is free even in bondage.”