In an essay published shortly before his incarceration was to complete five years without trial, Indian scholar and political activist Umar Khalid, 38, quoted a character from the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, “The House of the Dead,” which he had recently finished reading in jail.
“We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead,” Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov says in the novel. Highlighting the remark, Khalid wrote that in his life in jail — the “graveyard of the living” in his words — the dates for bail hearing give him “something to look forward to, something to live by, something to mark time by, and also something to hope about.”
These tiny hopes have been crushed time and again over the past five years, as his bail appeals have been repeatedly rejected, hearings often adjourned and delayed due to recusal of judges.
On September 2, hopes were shattered once again, as the High Court of Delhi in India’s national capital rejected the bail pleas of Khalid and eight other co-accused in what is popularly known as the “Delhi Riots Larger Conspiracy Case,” or the “Delhi riots case” in short.
All nine took an active part in protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019, a controversial law granting citizenship only to non-Muslim migrants from India’s Muslim-majority neighbors, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Following the northeast Delhi riots of February 2020, in which 53 persons, mostly Muslims, were killed and over 400 were injured, the Delhi police booked these activists, accusing them of conspiring to incite the riot. All nine accused are now in jail for five years or more, with their trial yet to be started.
In the court, India’s Solicitor General, the second-highest law officer, argued that this was “a pre-meditated, well-orchestrated conspiracy to commit unlawful activities threatening the unity, integrity, and sovereignty of India.” The government also argued that the accused “were constantly preaching to the masses by misleading them into believing that the CAA/NRC is an Anti-Muslim law.”
The division bench held that given the nature of the allegations levelled, “it becomes the arduous task of the Court to strike a balance between individual rights and the interests of the nation, as well as the safety and security of the general public at large.” It found the role of Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid in the conspiracy “is prima facie grave.”
Khalid completed his PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2019, while Imam was pursuing his PhD at the same university at the time of his arrest.
The other accused include Khalid Saifi, Mohd Saleem Khan, Shifa ur Rehman, Meeran Haider, Gulfisha Fatima, Athar Khan, and Shadab Ahmed — all of them associated with opposition politics or student activism.
Bemusing Developments
Soon after the 2020 Delhi violence, leaders of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) started highlighting clippings from Khalid’s February 17, 2020, speech in Amaravati in southern India as evidence that the violence was pre-planned by “the tukde tukde gang,” (literally, a gang that is breaking India into pieces) a nomenclature that India’s Hindu supremacists have coined to refer to their critics, especially civil rights activists and human rights defenders.
Subsequently, on March 6, the Special Cell of the Delhi police registered a complaint accusing Khalid, Imam and others of conspiring to incite the riots. Later, the police also charged them with terrorism, murder and sedition and slapped four sections of the controversial anti-terror law, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or the UAPA on them, apart from other penal sections.
Khalid’s first encounter with the state was in February 2016, when the police booked him and some other JNU students on charges of sedition for organizing an event on the campus when they protested the hanging of a terror convict. He spent three weeks in jail. In August 2018, he was shot at outside an event venue in Delhi by alleged Hindu nationalist fanatics. After fighting in court, he finally managed to complete his PhD in 2019. He was arrested in September 2020 in connection with the Delhi riots conspiracy.
The Shock
The court’s rejection of the bail applications of Khalid and others triggered shock waves, generating newspaper editorials criticizing their prolonged incarceration without trial. It has been repeatedly alleged that the case relies mostly on the prosecution’s misinterpretation of his speeches and use of witnesses whose identities have been protected.
Sanjay Hegde, a Supreme Court advocate, alleged that the high court had “abandoned scrutiny” of the prosecution’s concoctions and had taken “vague witness statements…as gospel.”
According to the high court, the accused had “delivered inflammatory speeches on communal lines to instigate a mass mobilization of members of the Muslim community.”
But Hegde highlighted that Khalid had actually pleaded for non-violent protests, as the actual transcript of his speech shows him telling his audience.
“We won’t respond to violence with violence. We won’t respond to hate with hate. If they spread hate, we will respond to it with love. If they thrash us with lathis, we will hold the Tricolour higher,” Khalid can be heard saying at Amaravati in his February 17 speech.
When the common people were fighting British colonizers following Mohandas Gandhi’s path of non-violent non-cooperation and civil disobedience, “the ancestors of the present-day rulers of India — the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha — were acting as agents of the British,” Khalid observed.
Khalid’s bail pleas have seen many rather strange judicial remarks.
In 2022, a Delhi high court bench interpreted Khalid’s speech as “giving the impression that only one community was fighting against the British” and called the repeated reference to “ancestors” as “obnoxious, hateful, offensive and prima facie not acceptable.”
The “ancestors” is an unambiguous reference to the Hindu nationalists of the colonial era — the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological-organizational parent of the BJP.
That they did not take part in India’s freedom struggle is a known historical fact.
The Conspiracy Dragnet
Colonial India had many instances of famous cases slapped against freedom fighters by the British colonial establishment, implicating a large number of independence activists of conspiring to destabilize the colonial empire. They were used primarily against those who could not be implicated in any direct act of violence.
In Independent India, such “conspiracy cases” emerged as a hallmark of the Modi rule, starting in 2014. On New Year’s Day 2018, when thousands of lower caste Hindus were celebrating the bicentenary of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon at that place, a Hindu nationalist mob allegedly attacked the gathering. The clashes that ensued left one person dead and several others injured.
Soon, the police framed a case of a larger conspiracy allegedly involving Maoist insurgents to destabilize India, including plans to murder Modi, and booked 16 academics, lawyers, human rights defenders, and cultural activists under different penal provisions and the UAPA.
During the Delhi riots, it has been alleged, the police stood as mute spectators when Hindutva mobs attacked Muslims and anti-CAA protesters, or even joined the Hindu mobs, and later implicated Muslims in cases of attacks launched by Hindus.
In Bhima-Koregaon, too, BJP-RSS activists and supporters were accused of perpetrating violence on a peaceful event. But the police acted on the complaints by Hindu nationalist activists and ignored those lodged against Hindu nationalists.
In October 2020, after the gang-rape and murder of a Dalit girl in the BJP-ruled north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh triggered protests, the police initiated a case, booking journalists and activists, for “deep conspiracy” to “trigger caste violence” and “defame the government.” The accused in the ‘Hathras conspiracy case’ were slapped with the UAPA, ensuring prolonged jailing.
From cancelling foreign funding licenses of civil society organizations critical of the government and initiating different kinds of probes against them to linking them with various conspiracies, including terrorist activities—the Hindu nationalist ecosystem has been fighting the civil society tooth and nail.
In 2021, India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval famously said: “The new areas of warfare have shifted from merely territorial frontiers to civil societies.”
As Khalid was gaining increasing attention as a rising civil society face of political activism — “just the kind of leader India needs, just the kind of hero Muslims await,” in the words of psephologist-turned-political activist Yogendra Yadav — he became an ideal target.