Prison is hardest at sunset. As the thousands of prisoners incarcerated in Delhi’s most infamous jail are cast out of their cells and forced into the dank yard until darkness falls, prisoner number 626714 feels the punishing dread begin to rise.
Yet the inmate – better known as Umar Khalid – was recently moved to discover that another political prisoner, exiled at a camp thousands of miles from India, wrote of the very same feeling more than 150 years ago.
“Even Dostoevsky refers to this state of mind at sunset in his prison memoir,” said Khalid, in his first interview since he was jailed in 2020. “I guess maybe it is because it starts sinking in that another day of your life has been spent 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 fiery student activist and then the face of anti-government protests that swept the country in 2019, the first major challenge to the government of Narendra Modi. By September 2020, he had been arrested and jailed as a terrorist, accused of being a “key conspirator” in deadly religious riots in Delhi and of conspiring to bring about “violent regime change”.
TV anchors still spit his name on nightly news shows, calling him a Muslim terrorist and an anti-national. Leftwing activists shout his name at protests and wear T-shirts bearing his face.
For rights groups and activists, Khalid has come to epitomise the crackdown on dissent under Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has ruled for 12 years and stands accused of weaponising the judicial system to go after opponents.
Khalid, a Muslim and leftwing 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 fuelling the 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 jail without trial as unjust. New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, sent him a handwritten note to express his solidarity, prompting an enraged response from the Indian government. The BJP maintains that India’s judicial system is independent and that Khalid’s prosecution is not connected to politics.
Due to the conditions of his incarceration, the Guardian could not meet Khalid for this interview, so the questions and answers were conveyed via family and friends.
After years facing allegations that he denies and dealing with a propaganda machine far beyond his control, the 38-year-old admits that it has been hard to not unravel completely.
“When you are reduced to just an image, either negative or positive, it becomes difficult to maintain not just your humanity but even your sanity at times,” he said. “Even those who sympathise with you, or portray you as someone larger 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 body and exacerbated all these anxieties within me.”
Yet his years in jail 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 “normalisation and glorification of hate speech and genocidal language”.
Today, he said, “the process of India becoming a post-truth society is near complete”.
We agreed not to discuss his legal case or his conditions in Tihar, but Khalid made clear that staying silent was not an option.
“You even hear murmurs about yourself from fellow prisoners you shared meals with, calling you a terrorist behind your back. This propaganda dehumanises me in people’s eyes,” he said. “Humanity is a privilege that is not granted to people like me.”
‘Silence emboldens this regime’
Growing up in the Muslim-majority neighbourhood of Jamia Nagar in south-east Delhi, Khalid said he witnessed first-hand how the rise of Hindu nationalist politics began fracturing society down 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, marginalised and demonised,” he said. “For any sensitive person, it is simply not possible to remain unaffected by all these developments.”
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 he was catapulted to prominence as the university found itself in the cross-hairs of rightwing ideologues, who sought to tear down a seat of learning long seen as a bastion of leftwing activism, intellectualism and debate.
After his participation at a political event at JNU in 2016, Khalid was arrested for sedition as India’s polarised media ran explosive headlines condemning him as an “anti-national” threat to the country. From that point, Khalid said, “my life was never the same”. The university even tried to prevent him submitting his PhD thesis, which he successfully challenged in the high court. It will be published this month as his first book, Fractured Communities.
Khalid’s collision with the BJP government hit its pinnacle in 2019, after the government passed a citizenship law that was seen to discriminate against Muslims. The JNU campus became a focal point for protests against the law. Hundreds of thousands later marched in Indian cities and towns in one of the first significant political challenges to the Modi regime.
Khalid was a key rallying figure in the movement. “We won’t respond to violence with violence. We won’t respond to hate with hate,” he told crowds in a now famous speech. “If they spread hate, we will respond to it with love.”
The state was unforgiving in its response. Protests were met with deadly police violence and figures associated with the BJP voiced inflammatory anti-Muslim and violent rhetoric. As tensions rose, sectarian riots erupted in Delhi in February 2020. Fuelled by online misinformation, Hindu mobs rampaged through capital where they targeted mosques and those who had Muslim names or were circumcised. Some Muslims retaliated.
The violence lasted three days and of the 53 who died, the majority were Muslim. But when Delhi police filed their charge sheets, no BJP figures were accused and very few Hindu rioters. Instead, Khalid, who was 1,000 miles away at the time, was accused of “masterminding” the riots.
He, alongside more than a dozen other prominent human rights defenders and student activists, was accused of “engineering communal riots” as a means to coordinate 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 most punishing terrorism laws, alongside a roster of other serious charges. Since then, Delhi police have faced accusations of fabricating evidence and forging witness statements in a mounting number of Delhi riots cases. They have not responded to these allegations.
While others named in the same case have been granted bail, Khalid’s case remains a poisoned chalice. Judges tasked with ruling on his bail have repeatedly delayed, adjourned and recused themselves. All have denied his applications. The BJP has denied any involvement in Khalid’s case but has openly welcomed rejections of his bail requests.
The endlessly dashed hopes for freedom have been “quite heartbreaking”, Khalid said. “Slowly hope started dying out. And without having hope to hang on to, surviving prison becomes exceptionally difficult – it takes a huge toll on you emotionally, mentally, and physically.”
He remains in jail while the police investigation goes on without any clear end, and no trial date in sight.
Khalid does not hold back his frustration at the failures of the diminishing opposition to Modi to stand up for the rights of the growing number of political prisoners incarcerated in India’s jails since the BJP came to power. Some, including the activist Father Stan Swamy, have died behind bars.
“Six years down the line, I must say that I am really disappointed and even feel isolated,” he said. “This silence – of opposition parties, of civil society groups, of celebrity activists who have made a career out of piggy-backing on people’s movements – emboldens this regime to go after further dissidents.”
Nights are when Khalid finds peace. Once back in his cell, and as the jangle of the warden’s keys fades to quiet, words scribbled on his wall – quotes spilled over from furious writings in his journal – give him some solace before he goes to sleep. Next to a picture of the anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh, Khalid has scrawled his famous words: “I am that mad soul who is free even in captivity.”