For Umar Khalid, prisoner number 626714 at Delhi's Tihar prison, the hardest moment of each day comes at sunset. As thousands of inmates are driven from their cells into the yard to wait out the remaining daylight, the weight of another day spent in captivity begins to press down. Khalid — a 38-year-old Muslim activist and one of India's most prominent political prisoners — recently found unexpected kinship in the prison memoir of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who described an identical feeling more than 150 years ago. In his first interview since his arrest in 2020, conducted through family and friends due to restrictions on his access, Khalid spoke of the psychological toll of nearly six years behind bars without a trial concluded.
Khalid rose to national prominence over the past decade, first as a student activist at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) — a state-funded institution long regarded as a centre of leftwing intellectual life — and later as a leading voice in the mass protests of 2019 against a citizenship law widely seen as discriminating against Muslims. His speeches from that period, urging crowds to meet hate with love, became emblematic of the movement. When sectarian riots erupted in Delhi in February 2020, leaving 53 dead — the majority Muslim — Khalid was accused by Delhi police of being a "key conspirator" who had "masterminded" the violence, despite being roughly 1,000 miles away at the time. He was arrested seven months later under India's most stringent anti-terrorism legislation, alongside a group of other human rights defenders and student activists. Delhi police have since faced mounting accusations of fabricating evidence and forging witness statements in related cases; they have not publicly responded to those allegations.
The charges, which Khalid describes as "dystopian," have kept him in pretrial detention while judges assigned to rule on his bail applications have repeatedly delayed, adjourned, or recused themselves. Several co-defendants in the same case have been granted bail. International human rights organisations have widely condemned his detention, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent him a handwritten note of solidarity — a gesture that drew an angry response from the Indian government. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party that has governed India for twelve years, maintains that the country's judiciary is independent and that Khalid's prosecution is not politically motivated.
Khalid himself rejects that framing entirely, describing the years of incarceration as a deliberate effort to silence dissent. "You even hear murmurs about yourself from fellow prisoners you shared meals with, calling you a terrorist behind your back," he said. "Humanity is a privilege that is not granted to people like me." He warns that India is close to becoming what he calls "a post-truth society," shaped by the "normalisation and glorification of hate speech and genocidal language." The propaganda directed at him, he says, has been difficult to withstand — not only because it endangers him, but because it flattens his humanity. "Even those who sympathise with you forget that I am a human being with my own share of vulnerabilities, fears and imperfections."
His case matters beyond his own fate. Rights groups argue it is one of the starkest illustrations of how counter-terrorism law can be used to hold government critics in indefinite pretrial detention — a process that itself becomes the punishment. Khalid's PhD thesis, written at JNU and the subject of a successful legal battle after the university attempted to block its submission, is being published this month as a book titled Fractured Communities. Even from inside Tihar, he insists, silence is not an option: "Silence emboldens this regime."