PThe risk is hardest at dusk. As thousands of prisoners imprisoned in Delhi’s most infamous jail are thrown out of their cells and forced to remain in the dank courtyard until night falls, prisoner number 626714 feels the fear of punishment beginning to rise.
However, the inmate – better known as Umar Khalid – was recently moved to discover that another political prisoner, exiled in a camp thousands of kilometers from India, wrote about the same sentiment more than 150 years ago.
“Even Dostoevsky refers to this twilight state of mind in his prison memoirs,” Khalid said, in his first interview since he was imprisoned in 2020. “I guess maybe it’s because it starts to sink in that you’ve spent another day of your life in captivity.”
Outside the walls of Tihar prison, there are few in India who do not know Khalid’s name. He rose to prominence over the past decade, first as a passionate student activist and then as the face of the anti-government protests that swept the country in 2019, the first major challenge to Narendra Modi’s government. In September 2020, he had been arrested and jailed as a terrorist, accused of being a “key conspirator” in deadly religious riots in Delhi and plotting to bring about “violent regime change.”
Television anchors still spit his name on the evening news, calling him a Muslim and anti-national terrorist. Left-wing activists shout his name at protests and wear T-shirts with his face.
For human rights groups and activists, Khalid has come to personify the crackdown on dissent under Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has ruled for 12 years and is accused of using the judicial system as a weapon to persecute his opponents.
Khalid, a Muslim and left-wing rights activist, is a particularly fierce critic of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda, which seeks to turn India from a secular country into a Hindu nation. He has 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 nearly six years in prison without trial as unjust. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent him a handwritten note to express his solidarity, prompting a furious response from the Indian government. The BJP maintains that the Indian judicial system is independent and that Khalid’s prosecution is not linked to politics.
Due to the conditions of his imprisonment, The Guardian was unable to meet with Khalid for this interview, so the questions and answers were relayed through family and friends.
After years facing accusations he denies and dealing with a propaganda machine far beyond his control, the 38-year-old admits it has been difficult not to completely unravel.
“When you are reduced to just one image, whether negative or positive, it becomes difficult to maintain not only your humanity but even your sanity at times,” 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 own share of vulnerabilities, fears and imperfections. And that these long years in prison have wreaked havoc on my mind and my body and have exacerbated all of these anxieties within me.”
However, his years in prison have not softened his position on the Modi government. As Hindu nationalism has become the dominant political force in India, Khalid describes his horror at the “normalization and glorification of hate speech and genocidal language.”
Today, he said, “the process of India becoming a post-truth society is almost complete.”
We agreed not to discuss his legal case or his conditions in Tihar, but Khalid made it clear that remaining silent was not an option.
“You even hear whispers about you from fellow prisoners you shared meals with, calling you a terrorist behind your back. This propaganda dehumanizes me in people’s eyes,” he said. “Humanity is a privilege not granted to people like me.”
‘Silence emboldens 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 fracture 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. “For any sensitive person, it is simply not possible to remain indifferent to all these events.”
While studying for his PhD at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Khalid embraced the student politics that thrived at the state-funded institution. But it was catapulted to prominence when the university found itself in the crosshairs of right-wing ideologues, who sought to tear down a seat of learning long considered a bastion of left-wing activism, intellectualism and debate.
Following his participation in a political event at JNU in 2016, Khalid was arrested for sedition as 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 this month as his first book, Fractured Communities.
Khalid’s clash with the BJP government peaked in 2019, after the government passed a citizenship law that was seen as discriminatory against Muslims. The JNU campus became a focal point of protests against the law. Hundreds of thousands of people subsequently marched in cities and towns across India in one of the first major political challenges to Modi’s regime.
Khalid was a key figure in the movement. “We will not respond to violence with violence. We will not respond to hate with hate,” he told the crowd in a now-famous speech. “If they spread hate, we will respond with love.”
The State was relentless in its response. The protests were met with deadly police violence and figures associated with the BJP expressed inflammatory, anti-Muslim and violent rhetoric. As tensions rose, sectarian riots broke out in Delhi in February 2020. Fueled by online misinformation, Hindu mobs rampaged through the capital, attacking mosques and people who had Muslim names or were circumcised. Some Muslims retaliated.
The violence lasted three days and of the 53 who died, the majority were Muslims. But when the Delhi Police filed its chargesheet, no BJP figures and very few Hindu rioters were charged. Instead, Khalid, who was 1,000 miles away at the time, was accused of “planning” the riots.
He, along with more than a dozen other prominent human rights defenders and student activists, was accused of “engineering communal riots” as a means of coordinating a “pre-planned attack on the nation” through “armed rebellion.”
Khalid described the charges as “dystopian,” but police officers arrived at his family home in Delhi seven months later to arrest him under the country’s toughest anti-terrorism laws, along with a list of other serious charges. Delhi Police has since faced accusations of fabricating evidence and falsifying witness statements in a growing number of Delhi riot cases. They have not responded to these accusations.
While others named in the same case have been granted bail, Khalid’s case remains a poisoned chalice. The judges charged with deciding on his bail have been repeatedly delayed, postponed and recused. All have denied their requests. The BJP has denied any involvement in Khalid’s case but has openly welcomed the rejection of his bail applications.
The endlessly dashed hopes for freedom have been “pretty heartbreaking,” Khalid said. “Slowly hope began to fade. And without hope to hold on to, surviving in prison becomes exceptionally difficult: it takes a huge emotional, mental and physical toll.”
He remains in prison as the police investigation continues with no clear end and no trial date in sight.
Khalid does not hold back his frustration at the failure of Modi’s dwindling opposition to defend the rights of the growing number of political prisoners imprisoned in Indian jails since the BJP came to power. Some, including activist Father Stan Swamy, have died behind bars.
“Six years later, I must say that I am really disappointed and even feel isolated,” he said. “This silence – from opposition parties, from civil society groups, from famous activists who have made their careers relying on popular movements – encourages this regime to persecute more dissidents.”
The nights are when Khalid finds peace. Once back in his cell, and as the jingling of the warden’s keys fades, the words scrawled on his wall—quotes from angry writings in his diary—give him some comfort before he goes to sleep. Next to a photograph of anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh, Khalid has scrawled his famous words: “I am that mad soul who is free even in captivity.”
