It was on four pages of a fancy notepad, the kind that comes with little jottings and sketches in the corners, that I wrote my letter to Umar Khalid, and posted it to an address in New Delhi. Not to Tihar Jail, where he has been residing since September of 2020, but to the house of Banojyotsna Lahiri, his closest friend who’d visit him every few weeks and could hand over the letter. The thought of writing to Umar occurred shortly after a Wednesday in February, when yet another bail hearing was adjourned and Umar and his advocate Kapil Sibal withdrew his plea from the Supreme Court, “to try their luck at a lower court”.
On September 13, Umar, a scholar from Delhi, would complete four years in prison, barring the seven days of bail in December 2022 that he was allowed to attend his sister’s wedding. He is charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, including rioting, murder and unlawful assembly. But more grievously, he is charged with terrorist activities and conspiracy under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), pronounced draconian by activists for its anti-democratic nature. A third charge under the Arms Act was also added by the Delhi police. Then they added sedition and promoting enmity between groups. All of these made it to the FIR, for his alleged role in triggering the Delhi riots of February 2020, during which violence had erupted in the north-east part, killing 53 persons and injuring hundreds, most of them Muslims.
Umar knew the arrest was coming. He’d recorded a video saying that if people were watching it, it means he has been arrested. This was the second time he was taken in, after the first infamous arrest of a group of students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016, for a protest that authorities and then a plethora of media houses labelled ‘anti-national’. The effects of this name-calling would be long lasting, and two years later, an attempt on his life would be made.
“Until then, he was a very common person, like any other University student. But after the 2016 arrest, he became the topic of national discussion, with a lot of love and a lot of hate — well, mostly hate. You can call that a breaking moment,” Banojyotsna told me on a day she came to Thiruvananthapuram with a documentary about Umar. Lalit Vachani, a filmmaker known for his documentaries like The Salt Stories and An Ordinary Election, told Umar’s story in his film Prisoner No 626710 is Present.
“I didn't set out with a plan to make this film. But after spending time with Banojyotsna and Shuddha (Shuddhabrata Sengupta — artist and friend of Umar Khalid), and beginning to look at the archive of Umar's speeches and the footage of the mainstream, Hindu nationalist media that framed him in the most egregious manner, I knew that I just had to make this film,” Lalit wrote in an email.
Umar’s speeches, known for their spark and vigour and a certain calmness, were all over the place just ahead of the Delhi riots when the country was erupting with protests over the Union government’s new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The Act, combined with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), was criticised as discriminative to Muslim immigrants, who, even after decades of having lived in India, may lose their citizenship and right to live in the country.
An edited version of Umar’s 17-minute-long speech, made at Amravati in Maharashtra, was displayed in a tweet by Amit Malviya, the IT cell head of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. This was in turn telecast by news channels like Republic TV and News 18. Playing the truncated version, the channels accused Umar’s speech of calling for violence in Delhi during former US President Donald Trump’s visit in 2020.
Umar’s lawyer Trideep Pais argued in court that the Delhi police based their case on the cut-out version of his speech, which was a far cry from the original that included messages of peace uttered by Mahatma Gandhi. “A message of unity based on Gandhiji was given that day and that was termed as an act of terror,” Pais said, playing the full speech at court.
That was three years ago. Several hashtags, calling for the release of Umar, after 100 days, 500, and 1000 days of incarceration, spread through the internet. Banojyotsna would share with Umar what came to him through post – cards and letters and offers of books to read in prison. “He must have read nearly 300 books in these four years. He reads a lot in prison,” she said.
Umar had always been a reader. Visuals of the book shelves he shared with Buno (as Banojyotsna is fondly called) are in Lalit’s film. But he was not so serious about academics, he had actually pursued a career in cricket, Buno said. What prompted his shift to ‘accidental activism’, according to her, was an incident that shook him in his youth – the Batla House encounter of 2008, carried out by the Delhi police, targeting alleged terrorists in Jamia Nagar. Two alleged terrorists and a police officer were killed, and a third accused who had been on the run arrested 10 years later. There was a lot of controversy surrounding the encounter, with activists questioning the haste of the police in carrying it out.
Umar hails from the same neighbourhood, in Jamia Nagar. His friend, writer and researcher Anirban Bhattacharya, said that that was something Umar used to talk about, how even in his school days he’d wonder about his friends coming from different parts of Delhi while his family continued to stay in Jamia Nagar, which was considered a ghetto. “The reality of ghettoisation was something he questioned even in his school,” Anirban recalled.
In a 2009 documentary called The Other, Umar, as a young student of the Delhi University, talked about this everyday discrimination the residents of the ghetto faced. “We don’t get pizzas delivered here, we don’t get internet connection, we don’t even get home loans,” he said in the film.
The Batla House incident changed his life, Buno said, “because he realised the kind of repression that the State can actually bring on marginalised communities like theirs and the ghetto that he was living in.”
It was after that that he joined the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The people he made friends with in those early years – Buno, Anirban, and Shuddha – remember him as someone keenly tuned into what was going on around him, asking countless questions, wanting to be part of something that could bring change. In Lalit’s documentary, Buno said that Umar would wake up with 50 questions everyday, seek answers, and do it again the next day.
Shuddha – Shuddhabrata, his friend and artist – said Umar’s persistent questions were thoughtful, difficult. “He is one of the most aware people I know, constantly plugged into what’s happening in the world. He has a very sensitive antenna for injustice and freedom. He embodies what it means to be a free human being. I know that his early student activism centred on questions of inequality in the University, as well as broader questions of caste, class, and discrimination based on religious identities,” Shuddha said.
For his PhD, Umar chose to research on Adivasi rights. He never identified himself as a Muslim activist. But that was before 2016, before sections of the media did everything short of pinning a label on his shirt to brand him an anti-national and terrorist. “There is a tendency, especially if the activist is a Muslim, to pigeonhole them saying, you will only speak about discrimination and lynching. Umar would say, he was a scholar of history, could they not ask him about the socio-economic situation of the country, about hunger and poverty. His research was on Adivasi rights, could they not ask him about that. It was primarily because he was identified as Muslim that they would only ask him about that,” said Apeksha Priyadarshini, journalist, Cinema Studies scholar and friend of Umar from his JNU days.
“Even during his arrest in 2016,” recalled Anirban, who was arrested along with Umar, “one of the policemen asked him, ‘We understand why Umar Khalid is here, but what about you, Bhattacharya?’”
Anirban said that Umar’s Muslim identity may have shaped his understanding of the world, that it was his reality, but it was only one of Umar’s identities. He had never been bracketed as a minority activist, but 2016 changed all of that, Anirban said. In Lalit’s film is a clip of Umar coming out of jail in 2016 and telling a small crowd how he, like Rohit Vemula (Dalit scholar who died by suicide after alleged institutional harassment at the Hyderabad University) was reduced to his immediate identity.
“There's something you observe over the course of the film. Looking at the footage over time, you observe Umar grow older, but also wiser and so much more mature over the years. You see the growth of a public speaker, you see the forging of a political self. For instance — observe Umar's speeches before he is arrested in 2016 and after his release. It is almost as if adversity has made or is making him stronger,” Lalit wrote to me.
His friends have observed it in the years since. Anirban remembered how when he and Umar were housed in adjacent cells, Umar would be restless, wondering if they’d be given bail, or what the news of the day was. “I had resigned myself to the possibility that we may be in jail for a long period while he was so invested in the everyday. I used to keep my jail room very clean and proper with books in one place, newspapers in another, and clothes in a third, while Umar’s cell was all dishevelled. Umar would be annoyed seeing my room so clean and ask if I wanted to settle there. He was the kind of person who imagined that tomorrow, everything would be fine.”
That was what worried Anirban when Umar was arrested a second time in 2020. He was not there with him this time. But to his surprise, Umar took it well. The many other arrests that took place between 2016 and 2020 had prepared him, Anirban said, bringing the realisation that this regime would want to keep dissenters in jail for a long time.
Restless is a word nearly everyone who knows him uses about Umar from his pre-incarceration days. Apeksha, who had met Umar in 2016 and later joined the Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Students Organisation founded by Umar and Anirban in JNU, said that he was extremely restless. She described him as the kind of person who had so much energy he’d pass it on to everyone around him, the kind of person who’d be engaged in student activism all the time, making posters or distributing pamphlets.
Both Apeksha and Anirban described Umar as someone who’d want to engage in several activities simultaneously – something for laid off workers in one place, something else for a student who was suspended in another – that some comrades found him too difficult.
“But he could be so insistent and talk patiently for hours that people would be convinced in the end. He made me contest three elections in JNU despite my reluctance the first two times. In prison, when we visit him and the time runs out, he’d convince the officials to allow a few more minutes. Even if it is a rightwinger who’d come to tell him what he did was wrong, he would sit that person down and talk to them, not run away. That’s why he was so taken aback when in one media interaction he was completely shut off and not allowed to air his perspective,” Apeksha said. She was referring to a television show hosted by Arnab Goswami in which Umar was shouted down and muted as he tried to respond to questions.
The 2016 arrest had not slowed him down, she said. Neither had the attempt on his life in 2018, when a gun was aimed at Umar. While it did not slow down his activism, there were other effects, Apeksha said. After the 2016 incident, Umar became wary of taking public transport. His photos were everywhere, someone could identify him and attack him. It happened once, when Umar went for a movie and someone assaulted him. “One of us would always accompany him,” she said.
The 2018 incident affected him in another way, she said. “The fear that something like this could happen was diminished. Not that he became reckless. But when you have been fearful of something and then it happens – if the gun had not become jammed in the shooter’s hand the bullet might have hit him – you become less scared.”
After the 2020 arrest, he has also grown calm, accepting his reality, even as he continued quelling his innate thirst for knowledge, reading four newspapers everyday, finishing one book after another, jotting down his observations, and trying to help inmates.
“He is able to look beyond his own personal injustice and look at others around him. He’d talk about people who are stuck in jail because they don’t have bail money or legal assistance, and then try to help them through his lawyers or friends,” Apeksha said.
Two years ago, in his reply to an open letter written by educator Rohit Kumar, telling him he continues to inspire people, Umar spoke about getting used to the tranquillity of prison, of quitting smoking and ‘the other drug’ – social media. Umar’s friends brush it off, saying let’s see when he comes back. Umar, they say, was always glued to Twitter. His last tweet was posted a little after midnight on September 13, the day of his arrest. He had shared a story on The Wire about a ‘riots conspiracy’ chargesheeted by the Delhi police naming eminent activists and academics.
“What he misses are the everyday things, like colours and smells. On one visit he told me about a day he was going back to jail after a court hearing, when he saw wedding halls all lit up during winter time. In jail it is all grey and monochromatic, he said. He also misses food. He was never a foodie and could survive on Maggie noodles and eggs and tea forever, but when you have restrictions in jail, you’d long for special food,” Apeksha said.
In the week that he was out on bail for his sister’s wedding, Umar feasted on everything he could lay his hands on, Buno reminisced in Lalit’s film.
None of it hampered his spirits, it would seem, for when they met him for ‘mulaqaat’ – the visiting time allowed every week – he’d come with notes that included, the friends said, some very bad jokes that he’d taken time to write down. “They are so bad, I cannot repeat them,” Buno told me.
During Shuddha’s visits it is always Umar telling him to be hopeful, and not the other way around, he said. “I feel quite charged and energised after every meeting with him, his optimism is infectious. He’d tell me that I should never get into prison because I drink only coffee and they don’t have coffee there.”
Anirban recalled that the last time he finished his mulaqaat with Umar, he had taken 20 steps before realising that he was still smiling from his visit. “It says a lot about a person when even after four years in jail, he leaves you with that kind of an aftertaste. You don't leave the room distraught or crestfallen, you leave with a smile.”
Umar is yet to answer my mail. Buno said that there was a shuffle in the jail when Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was arrested and taken to Tihar, and in that shuffle, Umar had lost some things. It does not matter, really. I just wanted to tell him, and I did, that just as we speak of ‘born artists’ there must be ‘born activists’ – people born to speak for other people around them, those who rarely get spoken for – and to end that letter with ‘Lots of respect, Cris’.