Umar Khalid: A Prisoner of Conscience 

The true measure of a democracy is not reflected in the pomp of parliament or the spectacle of  elections, but in how it treats those who dissent. This is why the political prisoner must be understood  not as an isolated legal category, but as a mirror held up to the State itself. The book, through the life of  Umar Khalid and the manner of his incarceration, holds a mirror to the way the Indian State deals with its dissenters – right from Khurram Parvez in Kashmir to Suneeta Potam in Chhattisgarh, to Surendra Gadling of the BK-16, and the recently arrested workers and activists in the Noida workers protest.  

As Dr. Ramchandra Guha writes in an essay in the book, “I must note that he is one of many fine, upright  men and women, who are languishing in jail under dubious charges hastily filed by the police under orders from their political masters. Some of these Indians are also scholars and researchers. Others are  social workers and civil society activists, who have in their life and work shown themselves to be  steadfastly committed to non-violence and the founding values of the Indian Constitution. It is this commitment to pluralism and democracy and perhaps nothing else that has made them fall foul of the  authoritarian and majoritarian tendencies of the ruling regime.”  

Novelist Milan Kundera once said that the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forging. This powerfully captures what the state tries to do with political prisoners. The prison becomes not merely an institution of confinement, but one of erasure of public conscience itself. The State seeks not only to incarcerate persons, but to delegitimise political struggles and, by locking those who speak the truth away, sever dissent and resistance from our public memory. 

In Umar Khalid’s own words spoken in 2016 at Jawaharlal Nehru University: "They fear us," he had said, referring to the government. "They fear our struggles and they fear us because we think." 

This has been the case throughout modern history. From colonised Ireland to apartheid South Africa,  from LaIn American dictatorships to occupied Palestine, prisons have long been the site where the most brutal aspects of state power are laid bare. The prison is also where the contradiction between the state’s professed democratic freedoms and actually-existing unfreedoms is laid bare. 

Nelson Mandela, reflecting on the anti-apartheid struggle, famously reminded the world: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” 

This observation is especially relevant to our discussion today. If one wishes to understand the moral  and democratic condition of a society, one must look not first at its constitutional promises, but at those whom it imprisons in the name of order, security, and law, and the conditions that persist within those  four walls.

Mandela’s own 27 years in prison, much of it on Robben Island, transformed the prison into a political archive of anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. In this sense, the history of political prisoners is inseparable from the history of liberation movements across the world. 

In Ireland, Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strikers fought not merely for better prison conditions, but  for recognition that they were political prisoners and not common criminals. Their insistence on political status reflected a larger struggle over legitimacy: who has the authority to define resistance as crime? 

In South Africa, Mandela and countless anti-apartheid activists were imprisoned precisely because they challenged the racial sovereignty of the apartheid state. 

And in Palestine, the question of political prisoners remains central to the ongoing struggle against  occupation. The extensive use of administrative detention, prolonged incarceration without trial,  solitary confinement, and the imprisonment of political leaders, students, journalists, and children has  made the prison one of the defining institutions of the Palestinian experience under occupation. Palestinian prisoners’ movements and hunger strikes have repeatedly invoked the legacies of Bobby  Sands and Nelson Mandela, placing their struggles within a shared global tradition of anti-colonial  resistance. 

This reminds us that the political prisoner is not simply a domestic legal issue. Rather, it is a recurring  feature of regimes confronted by movements for jusIce, equality and self-determination. 

The Indian context exists within this broader history. During the anI-colonial struggle, figures such as  Bhagat Singh, among others insisted on being recognised as political prisoners because their  incarceration arose from ideological conviction and collective struggle rather than criminal conduct. 

This distinction remains vital. 

Post-Independence India inherited not only the physical architecture of the British prison but also the  legal grammar of exceptionalism. From the suppression of communist and peasant movements to the  repression following Naxalbari, from the Emergency to the use of draconian laws including NSA, TADA,  sedition law and now UAPA, incarceration has repeatedly functioned as an instrument of political  discipline. 

Every phase, every era, has produced its resistance and its brand of political prisoners. In contemporary  India, the category of the political prisoner acquires renewed urgency. The incarceration of academics,  journalists, students, human rights defenders, trade unionists, Dalit intellectuals, Adivasi organisers, and  Muslim activists is in an India, which the introduction to the book characterises as a period marked by the dynamics of a fascism of the 21st century with distinctly Indian characteristics. This, Umar Khalid succinctly describes as the “cocktail of Manuvad and Market”. 

Umar Khalid’s PHD thesis titled “The Contesting Claims and Contingencies of Rule: Singhbhum 1800- 2000”, is instructive in understanding the challenges faced by the adivasis right from colonial rule to  present-day neo-liberal globalisation. Today, the resistance of these Adivasi communities is viewed as a  threat, which the state persecutes and silences through state repression and criminalisation of  democratic protest. 

Being Muslim is sufficient for an increasingly egregious assault by Hindutva organisations and the State  itself. Since 2014, we have repeatedly witnessed the troubling use of ordinary criminal law as an  instrument of social targeting, where the process itself becomes a form of punishment for many Muslims who find themselves accused, arrested, and incarcerated not on the strength of credible  evidence, but on the weight of prejudice and political expediency.  

As Ufaque Paiker notes in their essay in the book, “Umar’s politics and identity are perceived as a threat  to this government. He is not the kind of citizen, Muslim or student this current dispensation could be  comfortable with. Unapologetic about his Muslim identity, he has been a left activist who has started engaging with political issues during the Batla house encounter”. 

Whether it is Bhima Koregaon, or the anti-CAA protests or Adivasi struggles, Unlawful Activities  (Prevention) Act has become the toolkit to imprison dissenters. The UAPA stands as one of the most  enduring remnants of colonial rule. Under the British laws of this nature existed for one purpose alone:  to criminalise resistance and imprison those who dared to speak against the coloniser. It is a matter of  profound shame that more than 75 years after Independence, in a Republic that claims fidelity  to liberty, constitutional morality and democratic dissent, the State continues to preserve and  weaponise the very architecture of repression once used by our oppressors.  

The UAPA is characterised by vague allegations sufficing for registration of cases, prolonged pre-trial  incarceration since bail is extraordinarily difficult (through SecIon 43D(5), which allows courts to deny  bail if the allegations appear prima facie true on the prosecution’s version alone), extended investigation periods and trials that move at a painfully slow pace. Three UAPA detenues Fr. Stan Swamy (from among  the BK-16), Pandu Narote (co-accused with G.N. Saibaba) and student activist Kanchan Nanaware died in detention due to medical negligence, which the editors note in the introduction to make the point that prison conditions make it lethal for political prisoners.  

This is where Kafka’s The Trial becomes an uncannily relevant framework. 

Prolonged incarceration without trial, repeated denial of bail, and the use of vague and expansive legal categories convert procedure into coercion. 

The process becomes the punishment. 

Draconian laws and an increasingly pliant judiciary have served as the regime’s best friends in executing its political vendetta. Given that the cases that have been foisted have scant or false evidence, and will  in all probability not withstand legal scrutiny, the rule book of the State has been to make the process the punishment. This we also see in the case of Umar Khalid, where the Supreme Court itself abdicates its duty to protect civil liberties. It held that prolonged incarceration is not the sole determinant in granIng bail while devising a dubious theory of distinguishing Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam’s role as  “masterminds” and others as “local level facilitators”.  

At this point, Ambedkar’s conception of constitutional morality becomes indispensable.

Ambedkar repeatedly insisted that democracy cannot survive merely as an institutional arrangement;  it requires a public ethic grounded in liberty, equality, fraternity, and what he called public conscience. They will try to erase our public conscience by imprisoning our very best, but we must not let them.  

When dissent itself is criminalised, when critique is interpreted as conspiracy, when protest is recast as  terrorism, we are compelled to ask whether constitutional morality itself is under siege. The question of political prisoners is therefore, at its core, a constitutional quesIon since a democracy  secure in itself does not fear dissent. So when a State increasingly turns to prison as a response to  critique, it reveals not strength, but a crisis of its legitimacy. 

So why was Umar Khalid imprisoned after all? 

Bobby Sands, the Irish revolutionary, once said: “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.” 

One  always goes back to this statement. A slogan of defiance, for sure, but also a deeply philosophical and political understanding of dissent and resistance. The political prisoner does not endure incarceration  only as an individual. Their struggle is directed toward a future beyond the prison walls – toward a  society in which freedom, dignity, and justice are no longer criminalised. A brighter future will emerge  from the resistance of Umar Khalid and so many others; no struggle goes in vain. 

On  January 5, 2026 the Supreme Court denied bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, while others including Gulfisha Fathima were granted bail.  

Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia’s statement is extracted in the book where he says, “As a citizen, and like many  other people, I, too, had hoped that they would get bail… I could not see much of a difference between  those who got bail and those who did not”.  

Umar Khalid writes after the January 5, 2026 bail rejection:  

But what I really want those, who express solidarity with me, to understand is that I reject the  victimhood that I'm often identified with by others. There is pain in this seemingly endless wait,  indeed: but there is also a beauty to this pain. I'm content where I am, in spite of what I'm being  subjected to, because there is beauty in knowing that this is not about me alone. My incarceration is not merely to target me as an individual; it is to teach my fellow comrades a lesson that anyone who dares to ask uncomfortable questions to the powers that be can, and will, be forcefully silenced without respite. Therefore, this bail that I'm fighting, too, is larger than me as an individual. This is why the language in which those, who believe in what I have to say, speak of me and others in this case needs to change. Ours is a battle for a vision of a time in our society when some will not be more equal than others. This conviction is what makes this pain bearable. It's almost Christ-like, or Bhagat Singh-like. Both sacrificed their lives for causes of the oppressed and  there is beauty in knowing that this is the lineage of which I'm a part, in a history that shall be  penned for the future. 

This is why I wake up every day to the lines of Bhagat Singh that I’ve etched on my prison wall: 

Every tiny molecule of ash is in moIon with my heat
I am such a lunaIc that I am free even in Jail 

Thank you.

Clifton D’Rozario is the general secretary of All India Lawyers Association for Justice (AILAJ).

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