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Umar Khalid’s five years of incarceration: ‘Do I even know the world any more?’
Umar Khalid was uncharacteristically laconic in his response to questions about his life in prison.
It has been more than five years since the former student-activist from the Jawaharlal Nehru University was arrested and imprisoned for his alleged involvement in the 2020 Delhi riots. The trial is yet to begin.
In January, the Supreme Court denied Khalid bail. Days later, Scroll interviewed him through one of his JNU friends who regularly visits him in Tihar Jail.
Khalid, 38, said his first couple of years “away from social media” in Tihar were “good”. Over time, the detachment with which he approached the experience gave way to “restlessness”. And as his bail pleas snailed through the corridors of Indian courts, that restive feeling “metamorphosed to resignation”.
Today, he feels “disconnected” from reality. “Do I even know the world any more?” he asked.
A national storm erupted in February 2016 when the Modi government ordered a police crackdown against students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University for slogans raised at a campus event. Three students were arrested on charges of sedition, sparking a debate on nationalism and democratic freedoms.
Ten years later, we revisit the legacy of that moment by tracing the trajectories of four student-activists – the choices they made, the outcomes that followed, and what that reveals about political life in India.
Before his prolonged incarceration, Khalid used to believe that he knew the world quite well. In fact, in 2016, this confidence landed him in trouble.
Television crews had swarmed JNU the day after Khalid and nine others organised a controversial event on campus that February. At that time, most students were amused by the media frenzy over a gathering that they saw as ordinary. Some of them even engaged the visiting journalists in all earnest.
That day, Khalid volunteered for what, in hindsight, turned out to be risky assignments – he went on the primetime shows of establishment-friendly television channels where anchors like Arnab Goswami of Times Now shouted him down.
“That is when he realised that we were like frogs in a well,” said Apeksha Priyadarshini, his friend from JNU. “He understood that there were many people out there who did not wish to listen to him and that the world was nothing like the campus.”
Other television channels went one step further, singling out Khalid for his Muslim identity and labelling him a terrorist sympathiser.
He was researching his PhD at the time of his arrest. His doctoral thesis had nothing to do with the social milieu he came from, and instead focused on how the historical experience of colonialism disrupted the lives of Adivasis in Jharkhand.
Born in 1987, Khalid grew up in Delhi and is the eldest of six siblings. His middle-class parents made sure to provide him and his sisters the best education that they could.
His father was steeped in Muslim politics, but as early as 2009, Khalid told the makers of a student documentary that he was “hardly a Muslim”. He was a student of history at Delhi University's Kirori Mal College then.
Later, as a postgraduate student in JNU, he immersed himself in Left politics and began professing atheism. He first became a member of the Democratic Students' Union, a hard Left campus outfit that was severely critical of India's mainstream communist parties.
But he fell out with the organisation over disagreements with its approach to gender justice, and along with a few others, floated the Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Students Organisation in 2016. The group aspired to integrate the “struggle against caste system and patriarchy” within the Left's class politics.
Political sparring, however, never came in the way of making friends. On campus, Khalid was known for his affability.
A professor who met him while he was still writing his PhD recounted an anecdote about his love for conversation. She knew him to be a charismatic speaker but it was when she debated a range of social issues with him one-on-one in her home that she discovered his keenness to listen, his openness to being contradicted, and also his verbosity.
“Hours into the chat, he got up to step out for a smoke, saying he would be back shortly,” the professor recalled. “I told him, ‘Don't come back. It is quite late.' But he wanted to keep talking.”
Beneath the geniality, though, Khalid was experiencing inner turmoil. As Hindutva assertion pushed Muslims into a corner, he started thinking deeply about faith-based discrimination.
His artist friend Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who first met him at a 2012 convention in Delhi on the rights of political prisoners, said the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015 triggered the churn.
Around that time, the two had a long conversation about the philosopher Hannah Arendt exhorting those oppressed as Jews to respond as Jews. The young scholar was moved by the text, and even wanted to set up a reading circle to explore the potential for justice and freedom “within an Islamic framework”.
During the 2016 sedition controversy, television channels had labelled Khalid a “terrorist”. While he had publicly taken them on, the impact lingered – he could no longer take the metro or go anywhere alone because of the fear of an attack, said one of his friends.
These fears came true in August 2018, when two men from Haryana made an unsuccessful attempt on his life. At that time, he had just completed his PhD and was busy with United Against Hate, the campaign that he had co-founded with the intention of tackling hate crimes.
“After the assassination attempt, he would always keep looking over his shoulder,” his friend Anirban Bhattacharya recalled. “If anybody stared at him for more than three seconds, he would get uncomfortable.”
The incident prompted Khalid's return to Jamia Nagar, the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in southeast Delhi where he had grown up. His friend Nabiya Khan, who also lived in the area then, said she saw him develop deeper roots within the community as he organised medical camps and took part in other local initiatives in those months.
“The major change I noticed in him was that he went from theory to practice,” she said. “His engagement deepened and he became more grounded in the community. His days and nights were spent among the people of Jamia Nagar.”
In December 2019, Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which for the first time introduced a religious criteria for Indian citizenship.
Khalid emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the new law, which many saw as an instrument of discrimination against Muslims. For months, he criss-crossed the length and breadth of the country as protesters, largely Muslim, sought him out for his speech-making.
An activist who shared the dais with him at one of the many protests against CAA in those days recalled feeling uneasy at Khalid being introduced as “the new leader of Indian Muslims”. Khalid, to this activist's great surprise, did not object to the use of this descriptor.
Was the newfound popularity making him embrace identity politics? His friend, journalist Kaushik Raj, said Khalid had little time to think about such questions then. He was clear that the opposition to CAA must be broad-based and not merely driven by identity.
“If you are against attacks on the Constitution, you can speak up against it as a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh or even an atheist,” Raj recalled Khalid once telling him.
In public, too, Khalid stressed on the “socio-economic demands” of the Muslim community more than its religious grievances, drawing on his long-held leftist frameworks. Privately, though, he was growing tired of repeating himself at one anti-CAA protest after another.
“I don't want to do all this,” Khalid said to a friend who used to accompany him on these trips then and requested not to be identified. The two were headed to a protest in Kerala, but got stuck in Bengaluru airport because of a flight delay. Khalid, his friend recollected, had been silently ruminating for a long time before he spoke.
“I just want to go to a village in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh and be there with people in greater need,” he said to his friend.
Eventually, it was a speech he made at an anti-CAA protest in Amravati, Maharashtra, that led to his arrest in the Delhi riots conspiracy case in September 2020.
In the speech, Khalid had invoked Mahatma Gandhi and called for non-violent protests to coincide with the upcoming visit of the United States President Donald Trump in February that year. But Delhi Police blamed the violence that erupted during Trump's visit on Khalid and other activists, holding up the Amaravati speech as evidence of a “premeditated” conspiracy.
A professor who was with Khalid on the day he was called in for questioning by the Delhi Police, and later arrested, was struck by how composed he was: “He was not stressed at all.”
His friends insist that he has not changed much in the five years and five months that have lapsed since then. Sometimes, his spirits drop, especially after he returns to jail after having spent a few days outside on interim bail. But he somehow manages to pull himself out of these low phases, a close friend said.
He also continues to read voraciously and write with more or less the same academic rigour.
One source of frustration that Khalid has expressed in recent meetings with close friends is “the language” of those vowing support for him. As one friend put it, he is tired of being “pigeonholed” as an atheist while he and other political prisoners are “persecuted” on the basis of their faith.
Another friend of over 12 years recalled talking to Khalid about the “transformation” in how he sees himself when he was out on interim bail last December.
“A communist does not believe in these identities, but can you really escape them?” she asked. “Many elite Muslims like Javed Akhtar are uncomfortable with their identity. The other trap is getting caught up in identity politics.”
Khalid, she said, “has been dealing with this question”.
Also read: Shehla Rashid is now a college teacher in Kashmir: ‘Democracy cuts everyone down to size'
From JNU night meetings to Kunal Kamra podcast, how Anirban has kept the conversation going
From JNU to Congress, Kanhaiya shrugs off contradictions: ‘Will be proven right 50 years later'
Source: Scroll
Related Posts: Politics, India, Umar Khalid, Political Prisoners, Muslims in India, Hindutva, CAA, JNU, Freedom in India, Sedition
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