This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

It was nonetheless darkish outdoors when Umar Khalid sat right down to make the farewell video. He had stayed up all night time at an in depth pal’s house, the place he had simply celebrated his thirty third birthday, blowing out candles and reducing a chocolate cake. Now he sat on the sofa stiff with stress, darkish circles below his eyes, his face tinged a sickly yellow. He had been smoking nonstop for hours and eaten so little that he was feeling unwell. His pal was seated on the bottom close by, his telephone able to document.

“If you’re watching this video,” Khalid stated, “it means that I’ve been arrested.”

It was September 2020, on a sizzling, stuffy morning in Delhi. Seven months earlier, in late February, a wave of sectarian violence had ripped by the Indian capital. Amid mass demonstrations in opposition to a restrictive citizenship regulation that focused Muslims, a mob goaded by an area chief clashed with Muslims within the space. Over the following 4 days, violence swept by predominantly Muslim neighborhoods; no less than 53 people have been killed and 14 mosques gutted.

The timing was noteworthy: U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in India to satisfy with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the day after the riots erupted. While Trump and Modi hugged and lavished each other with praise, Delhi’s northeastern district burned.

As the violence unspooled, Khalid was midway throughout the nation within the japanese state of Bihar. He was headlining a protest the place he told the audience seated cross-legged earlier than him that many Hindu supremacists “have nurtured the dream that Muslims will leave the country, that they will go to Pakistan.”

“They have spread hate to make it happen. They have nothing but hate. But we will respond with love,” he stated. “They are trying to provoke us. They are trying to start a riot. They are saying, ‘Shoot them.’ What are we saying? We are saying, ‘There is no better place in the world than India.’”

The secular activist rose to nationwide prominence giving highly effective speeches criticizing Modi and his far-right political occasion for main a marketing campaign of repression beforehand unseen in impartial India. Khalid has compared Modi to India’s British colonizers, whose centuries-long stranglehold was enabled by insurance policies that pitted non secular and ethnic teams in opposition to one another, fueling mutual suspicion and resentment. A goal of the Modi authorities since he was a college pupil, Khalid was now among the many leaders of a broad-based motion that had emerged to protest the prime minister’s anti-Muslim insurance policies — and the federal government was desperate to squash its momentum.

Khalid was among the many leaders of a broad-based motion that had emerged to protest Modi’s anti-Muslim insurance policies — and the federal government was desperate to squash its momentum.

In March, Amit Malviya, the social media chief of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, tweeted a video of a speech Khalid had given forward of Trump’s go to wherein he urged protesters to fill the streets and inform the U.S. president that Modi was dividing India and mocking Gandhian values of nonviolence. Malviya described Khalid’s viewers as “largely Muslim.”

“Was the violence in Delhi planned weeks in advance by the Tukde Tukde gang?” he wrote on Twitter, utilizing a pejorative to seek advice from the BJP’s political critics. This single tweet was turned from a query into a press release and reported as reality by cable information channels aligned with Modi. It quickly turned the idea for accusing Khalid of masterminding the riots.

The Covid-19 outbreak and the federal government’s nationwide lockdown compelled an finish to the demonstrations, in addition to Khalid’s speeches at protest websites. Exhausted, Khalid and his companion of 10 years, Banojyotsna Lahiri, went to go to her household and unwind.

In April, whereas Indians have been ordered to remain of their properties, the Delhi police started arresting pupil leaders and activists who had participated within the citizenship protests, charging over a dozen high-profile activists with a slew of offenses, together with homicide, sedition, and, not lengthy after, terrorism. News of the arrests put Khalid on edge. Lahiri recalled, “There was crazy tension in the air.”

In August, Khalid acquired a telephone name from the Delhi police. The summons was couched as a request for assist with the police’s investigation into the riots, however Khalid knew his flip had come.

Over the following few weeks, Khalid was referred to as in twice for questioning. He knew the interrogations weren’t supposed to ascertain the info; they have been a sham to make it appear as if the officers have been doing their job. He was totally conscious of how this could finish.

He determined to document the video, telling his shut pal to launch it at a press convention when the police lastly made their transfer.

“They are silencing me,” Khalid said, staring into the smartphone digital camera. “They are putting me behind bars. But they also want to imprison you — with lies. They want to frighten you into silence. I’d like to end with an appeal: Don’t be afraid. Raise your voice up against injustice.”

Three days later, on September 13, the police referred to as Khalid to the workplace of town’s counterterrorism unit. This time, they didn’t let him depart. Nearly three years on, he stays in jail and not using a trial date.

The Modi authorities has made a behavior of hounding anybody who criticizes the prime minister’s efforts to rework the world’s largest democracy right into a majoritarian police state. Since Modi got here to energy in 2014, his authorities has wielded the regulation to focus on each sort of critic on each platform, from college students expressing opinions on social media to human rights activists investigating atrocities. In March 2023, a courtroom in Gujarat — the place Modi was born and had an extended political profession earlier than changing into prime minister — convicted the chief of India’s predominant opposition occasion, Rahul Gandhi, of defaming Modi. The choice led to Gandhi’s disqualification as a member of Parliament and jeopardized his eligibility to contest Modi in nationwide elections subsequent yr. Though the Indian Supreme Court has since suspended the conviction, the transfer was the clearest signal but that India is now an elected autocracy.

Two decades-old legal guidelines have been Modi’s favorites for suppressing dissent and eradicating his critics from public life: the colonial-era sedition regulation and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a so-called anti-terror regulation. Khalid is among the many few Indians who’ve been charged below each.

Between 2014 and 2020, greater than 7,000 folks have been charged with sedition, according to a database printed by Indian information web site Article 14. The UAPA accounted for more than 8,000 arrests between 2015 and 2020, in accordance with a research by the Indian human rights nonprofit People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

“These laws were already on the books — what we are seeing now is malice,” stated journalist Aakar Patel. “This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

“This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

When I visited Delhi late final yr, even mere conversations concerning the state — or “the regime,” as many referred to as the Modi authorities — have been steeped in worry. People wished to speak with me by safe messaging apps. When we met, it was at locations similar to a park at nightfall, the place they might not be acknowledged or overheard. A transcriptionist based mostly in India later declined to work on this piece for worry of being implicated in journalism that was essential of the federal government. The tradition of pluralistic debate that impressed economist Amartya Sen to coin the time period “the argumentative Indian” has been all however worn out.

Despite India’s divisive and unstable political atmosphere, Modi stays extremely popular amongst voters and is nearly sure to win a 3rd time period subsequent yr. The BJP has spent a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} in taxpayer money to construct a cult of character round him. His face is in every single place, from front-page newspaper advertisements to Covid vaccination certificates. A satellite tv for pc launched into house in 2021 carried a photograph of Modi. Despite being solely 5 toes, 7 inches tall, Modi towers over the Indian folks in giant cardboard cutouts which have popped up everywhere in the nation.

The objective of this symbolism isn’t misplaced on Indians. It is a loyalty check. Long after Independence Day final August, gasoline stations, properties, and even avenue distributors in Delhi continued to fly the Indian tricolor. One lady informed me that as a private act of resistance, she had determined to not show the flag. Then she heard that gangs of Hindu vigilantes have been roving the realm, noting down the names and addresses of those that refused to fall in line. She went as much as her terrace and raised her flag.

Growing Up Muslim in India

Last fall, two years after Khalid was arrested, I frolicked together with his household in Delhi. Their elegant house was filled with books and images. A maid labored within the open-plan kitchen whereas one in every of Khalid’s youthful sisters chatted with a cousin. His father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, introduced out a tray stuffed with snacks and served tea. At first, Khalid’s mother and father have been politely reserved. But when his mom, Sabiha Khanam, a soft-spoken lady who wears a hijab, sat down subsequent to me, she planted her toes firmly on the bottom as if decided to not maintain again.

“My son had a bright future,” she stated. “He could have moved abroad, bought a nice house, a nice car. It was all within his grasp. But he said, ‘I only want to live in India.’” She shook her head. “And he’s the one they call a terrorist?”

Khanam’s mother and father moved from the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to Delhi when she was a baby; she grew up amongst a big prolonged household helmed by her father, a gross sales tax officer with town authorities. Ilyas got here from an activist household: His paternal grandfather had been a freedom fighter with the Muslim League and after independence joined the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a motion to ascertain Islamic fundamentalism in India that later moderated its views as a result of they have been so unpopular amongst Indian Muslims. Khanam and Ilyas met as members of Students’ Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, launched in 1977 to supply Muslims ethical assist and camaraderie in a nation that was typically brazenly antagonistic towards them.

The friction across the acceptance of Muslims as Indian will be traced again to the Partition of 1947 and the division of British India alongside non secular strains: Hindu- and Sikh-majority areas remained inside impartial India, whereas Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims. Though 35 million Muslims selected to remain in India, the Hindu supremacist teams that mushroomed within the run-up to Partition — specifically the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideology’s mothership and the world’s largest volunteer paramilitary drive, which Modi joined as a baby — considered them as an excellent higher risk after the subcontinent was break up.

Since then, regardless of being India’s largest minority non secular group, the nation’s greater than 200 million Muslims have been systematically underrepresented and discriminated in opposition to in just about each space of public life, from training to employment to housing. SIMI impressed upon members the necessity to uplift the group by training and job coaching; the group got here to be recognized for its cadre of educated Muslims, together with Ilyas, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry.

By the time Ilyas turned SIMI’s nationwide president within the Eighties, Khanam was in control of the Delhi girls’s wing. “When it was time to marry,” Ilyas informed me, “I wanted someone related to the movement. So I married her.” Was it a love marriage? I requested. “No, no,” he replied, trying offended. “Not at all.” Khanam burst out laughing. “Not for me either,” she stated.

When their first youngster was born in 1987, Ilyas and Khanam named him after their favourite non secular figures: the second caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab, who’s considered the daddy of Islamic jurisprudence, and the seventh-century navy commander Khalid ibn al-Walid. Khanam took her son in every single place she went, together with to spiritual gatherings.

To his mother and father’ disappointment, Khalid confirmed little interest in Islam. In his late teenagers, he declared himself an atheist. If Khalid had a faith, it was cricket. His dream was to play for India, like his hero Irfan Pathan. Khalid was an all-rounder with a particular present for quick bowling, and he gained a repute for trash-talking opponents. Doted on by his household, the eldest youngster and solely boy out of six children, Khalid grew up self-confident and resilient. But beginning in his late teenagers, he turned preoccupied with the abject state of his neighborhood. 

Khalid’s residence was in Zakir Nagar, a Muslim space of the capital recognized for being overcrowded and unsanitary. Dangerous coils of electrical wires hung over the streets, and the pungent mixture of sewage, livestock, and exhaust fumes lent the realm its signature odor. “We [can’t] get pizzas delivered, you don’t get internet, you don’t get home loans,” a teenage Khalid had said about his neighborhood in a pupil documentary.

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’”

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’” stated Anirban Bhattacharya, the pal in whose house Khalid recorded his farewell video. Khalid would come to appreciate that even privileged Muslims would slightly increase their households in a ghetto than in a religiously combined space, the place their Hindu neighbors may activate them.

Khalid’s political consciousness developed as he grew into maturity. In 2008, when he was 21 and finding out historical past at Delhi University, a police inspector and two younger Muslim college students who police described as terrorists have been killed in a shootout close to the place Khalid grew up. The Batla House encounter — named for the realm the place the incident passed off — stays controversial. Police have used so-called encounters to masks extrajudicial killings and assist official narratives about threats to nationwide safety, together with in Kashmir, the place Indian safety forces ceaselessly declare they’re defending themselves in gun fights that kill civilians energetic within the area’s independence motion.

The police used the Batla House encounter to extend surveillance of Muslims within the space; stop-and-frisk turned routine. For Khalid, it was a seminal second in his understanding of how safety businesses violently goal Muslims, no matter whether or not they commit against the law.

“I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

“I was in the kitchen, and he came over and rested his head on my shoulder,” Khanam informed me. “I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

The stereotyping and ostracization of Indian Muslims had elevated since September 11. Days after the assaults, U.S. President George W. Bush informed a joint session of Congress, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Eager to please a strong ally, and with its personal ax to grind, the Indian authorities, which was then additionally run by the BJP, banned SIMI, declaring it a terrorist group.

Ilyas and Khanam had lengthy left SIMI. In 1985, Ilyas began working for a media firm; Khanam launched a boutique promoting hijabs and arranged literacy lessons for adults from deprived backgrounds. But the stigma of getting as soon as belonged to SIMI haunted the couple: The anti-terror regulation the BJP used to crush SIMI was the identical one which, years later, it might deploy in opposition to Khalid.

Modi’s Reign of Terror

The Indian authorities’s dedication to stamp out terrorism didn’t prolong to Hindus, and by the early 2000s, Hindu extremist teams had been linked to quite a few lethal assaults on Muslims, together with the bombing of a practice connecting India to Pakistan, a blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, and another blast at a mosque close to Mumbai on the finish of Ramadan.

The most infamous episode of Hindu terror in India’s latest historical past occurred below Modi’s watch in 2002, when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat. After a practice filled with Hindu pilgrims caught fireplace, killing 59 folks, Modi declared the incident a “terrorist attack” and had the charred our bodies placed on show on the state capital. According to Human Rights Watch, Hindu mobs instantly responded to the canine whistle with a frenzy of bloodletting that lasted three days and left no less than 2,000 folks, largely Muslims, useless as police both stood by or participated within the violence. Despite accusations of complicity from a number of home and worldwide human rights teams, Modi was reelected in a landslide victory later that yr and have become Gujarat’s longest-serving chief minister.

In 2005, after an investigation by the Indian authorities concluded that the practice fireplace was an accident, the U.S. State Department denied Modi a visa to talk at Madison Square Garden in New York below a regulation that prohibits the entry of foreigners who have committed “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The Obama administration lifted the ban after Modi turned prime minister.

As India’s high elected official, Modi has harnessed the nation’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the regulation to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors. The Modi authorities has empowered native right-wing officers and Hindu vigilantes to make life for a lot of Indian Muslims not simply tough, however insufferable. Muslims have confronted financial boycotts of their companies and bulldozers destroying their properties after officers arbitrarily deem them unlawful constructions. Several states have adopted legal guidelines that focus on Muslims, together with criminalizing the slaughter of cows, possession of beef, and interfaith marriage.

Few Hindu vigilantes who’ve lynched dozens of Muslims have been arrested — despite the fact that many of those crimes have been dedicated in public, captured on video, and shared on-line.

“Towards what end?” stated Patel, the journalist. “Exclusion. Apartheid. To say, ‘We don’t want you.’ This is ideological. [Hindu supremacists] genuinely hate these people.”

Even punishments for previous wrongdoing will be reversed on the authorities’s whim when the victims are Muslim. In August 2022, 11 Hindu males convicted of gang-raping their Muslim neighbor in the course of the Gujarat riots walked free after an intervention from the federal government. Bilkis Bano was 5 months pregnant on the time of the assault. The males killed her 3-year-old daughter by smashing her head to the bottom, in addition to 14 different members of the family, together with feminine kin who have been additionally sexually assaulted. They had been sentenced to life in jail, however a evaluate committee determined to launch them. A BJP politician on the committee told an Indian information outlet that the lads have been “honest people. … Their behavior in prison and the behavior of their family is very good.”

Modi has harnessed the nation’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the regulation to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors.

In a press release launched by her lawyer, Bano said the choice left her “bereft.” “I trusted the highest courts in our land. I trusted the system, and I was learning slowly to live with my trauma,” she stated. “The release of these convicts has taken from me my peace and shaken my faith in justice.”

From the bold-faced discrimination and subjugation of Muslims emerged a vocal opposition to Modi and his Hindu supremacist agenda. In response, the federal government has used a authorized dragnet to brush up his critics and stifle dissent.

When it was first handed in 1967, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was solely relevant to organizations; the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have been later banned below the regulation. When Modi got here to energy, his authorities amended the UAPA so people could possibly be accused of terrorism and detained for as much as six months with out formal fees.

“Every country has counterterror laws, but the UAPA does not meet international standards,” stated Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “Is Umar Khalid really comparable to the 9/11 terrorists? And if not, the government is undermining the entire principle of a legislation that is meant to protect the public from extremely brutal acts.”

Like Khalid, many Indians who’ve been charged below the UAPA are public figures who’ve spoken out in opposition to injustice and command widespread respect for his or her work. Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest with Parkinson’s illness, was amongst 16 outstanding human rights activists arrested on terrorism charges in 2018, accused of participating in a Maoist plot to assassinate Modi. Swamy had moved to a distant space of japanese India about three a long time earlier to reside amongst Indigenous communities below risk from mining firms, including Adani Group — owned by billionaire coal tycoon and Modi confidante Gautam Adani — that was permitted by the government to develop its mining operations on Indigenous forest land.

In jail, Swamy was disadvantaged of a straw and sipper he wanted to drink water. His requests for bail on medical grounds have been denied a number of occasions. When he died of cardiac arrest in 2021, he was nonetheless awaiting trial. A U.S.-based digital forensics agency later found that the computer systems owned by Swamy and no less than two different activists had been infiltrated by a hacker who planted proof that was used to arrest them.

When courts do grant bail in UAPA instances, it’s below situations that drive as soon as outspoken activists to exist as half-citizens. Safoora Zargar, one of many pupil leaders arrested after the citizenship protests, was granted bail two months later as a result of she was pregnant. However, she was forbidden to go away Delhi with out permission from the courtroom and needed to name the investigating officer on her case each two weeks. Zargar informed me that her legal professionals suggested her to not communicate publicly “just to be on the safe side.” Though she hasn’t given speeches since her launch, she nonetheless attends protests and is energetic on social media, a call she stated she makes at “great personal risk.”

Modi’s critics have additionally been charged below an anti-sedition law launched throughout British rule to imprison freedom fighters, together with Mahatma Gandhi. According to Article 14’s database, from 2010 to 2021, 149 people have been charged with sedition for making “critical and/or derogatory” remarks in opposition to Modi; the utmost penalty is life in jail.

Notably, younger persons are probably the most susceptible to sedition fees. From 2015 to 2020, the general public arrested for violating this regulation have been under the age of 30.

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country,” stated Ganguly, “because from these students will emerge a democratic space with a variety of political opinions and a diversity of political thought that will enrich any democratic process.”

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country.”

Last yr, in response to nine petitions difficult its constitutionality, the Supreme Court suspended the regulation, asking the federal government to cease issuing sedition fees or punishing these already charged whereas the phrases of the regulation are reassessed. The Law Commission of India, which is below the federal government’s purview, has argued not solely that the sedition regulation must be reinstated, but additionally that the punishment must be extra extreme.

Despite the high-profile nature of lots of the arrests, they hardly ever lead to widespread protest, partly as a result of the arrests are sometimes the fruits of a media marketing campaign wherein authorities critics are vilified as anti-Indian. By the time these dissidents are imprisoned, the tide of public opinion could have turned in opposition to them.

Indians are so consumed by Modi’s model of politics that they overlook the shortage of jobs for younger folks and any actual hope of a promising future, Harsh Mander, a human rights advocate who himself has been focused by the federal government, informed me. “They are persuaded by the idea of scapegoats, and they are willing to accept anything — hunger, joblessness, even bodies decimated by Covid floating down the Ganges — because they are preoccupied by something else: hatred.”

Khalid turned one in every of Modi’s targets in 2016, when he and a gaggle of fellow graduate college students who had spent most of their grownup lives with their noses caught in books have been branded enemies of the state.

“Creating a Witch Hunt”

I met Khalid in May 2016 whereas reporting on the occasions that had led to his arrest and people of different pupil organizers accused of sedition at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Khalid, who had not too long ago been launched after almost a month in jail, invited me to tea on the identical outside café the place, three months earlier, he and different college students had held a vigil for a Kashmiri man accused of terrorism and hanged after a botched trial — an annual demonstration that the media blew up in a single day right into a nationwide information story.

The JNU campus — like cinemas, malls, and different public venues in Delhi — had non-public safety personnel on the entrance. When I arrived, there have been additionally law enforcement officials of their trademark khaki uniforms, additional safety launched after the vigil. The air buzzed with the sound of walkie-talkies.

Once by the gates, I used to be transported from the crowded avenue filled with potholes to broad, spotless vistas, lush greenery, and the unvarnished brick buildings that the architect CP Kukreja had left uncovered to match the crimson soil upon which they have been constructed.

It was morning, and the café was full of scholars. Khalid was sitting at a desk speaking to a pal. He wore a kurta with denims and stout sandals, a scarf thrown round his neck and shoulders. Though he appeared gaunt, Khalid was filled with power, his eyes intent, his speech quick. Between his fingers rested a Navy Cut cigarette, his favourite model, which he purchased in packs and smoked one after the opposite.

Khalid was engaged on his historical past Ph.D. at JNU, a liberal arts establishment recognized for fiery intellectuals who’ve gone on to mildew international methods of considering, changing into political leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and famend novelists. Here, Khalid was launched to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leo Tolstoy, and studied Karl Marx, whose imaginative and prescient for a stateless, classless society he got here to consider was the most effective resolution for a rustic as unequal as India. Khalid’s doctoral analysis targeted on an Indigenous group’s battle to take care of management over their land. He was so certain he wouldn’t depart India that he had by no means utilized for a passport.

To some at JNU, Khalid’s concepts gave the impression of loony leftism. But his stressed optimism, inquiring thoughts, and activist spirit made him well-liked and straightforward to get together with. He liked movies and pestered mates to look at them with him, providing a play by play. He was also referred to as a prankster with what some have fondly described as “a cringeworthy sense of humor.”

To some at JNU, Khalid’s concepts gave the impression of loony leftism. But his stressed optimism, inquiring thoughts, and activist spirit made him well-liked and straightforward to get together with.

“In the milieu in which I’ve grown up, I’ve known people who have been arrested on false charges,” he informed me throughout our assembly, referring to folks he’d met by his mother and father’ activism. “I know of people who have been brutally tortured or forced to sign false confessions or spend years in prison before being acquitted of all charges. I only spent 24 days in jail. That’s nothing compared to some.”

On the night of February 9, 2016, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and different college students marked the 2013 execution of a Kashmiri shopkeeper, Muhammad Afzal Guru. Though he had denied aiding the 2001 assault on India’s Parliament that killed 9 folks, Afzal Guru was sentenced to dying based mostly on what novelist and activist Arundhati Roy described as a “pile of lies and fabricated evidence.” For many, together with the JNU college students, Afzal Guru’s case represented a confluence of injustices: the usage of capital punishment, the unfair therapy of Muslims by India’s prison justice system, and state repression of Kashmiris. Past occasions to commemorate him had been held on campus with out incident, so the scholars have been greatly surprised when a TV crew confirmed up.

Members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad additionally got here out. Since Modi’s election, ABVP and different Hindu supremacist pupil teams have more and more acted as proxies for the BJP on school campuses. They rejected the existence of caste-based discrimination and used claims of “Hinduphobia” to deflect criticism. A month earlier than the JNU occasion, members of ABVP on the University of Hyderabad had focused a doctoral pupil who was Dalit, a member of India’s lowest and most deprived caste. Rohith Vemula was subsequently suspended for preventing caste discrimination on campus; after the college upheld the choice, he hanged himself.

At JNU, ABVP had prevented the screenings of two documentaries essential of the BJP. But amongst most college students, the group wasn’t despised a lot as dismissed for being on the incorrect aspect of historical past. Khalid referred to ABVP’s joint secretary as bhai, or brother. Another member of the group was Khalid’s neighbor, and Khalid typically stopped by his place to bum a cigarette or a lighter.

At the occasion commemorating Afzal Guru, ABVP members heckled the organizers. “He who speaks of Afzal will die Afzal’s death,” they shouted.

The college students replied with a call-and-response chant borrowed from India’s feminist motion: “What do we want?” “Freedom from hunger! Freedom from casteism!”

The scene was chaotic, however nobody was damage, and by the point the scholars have been again of their rooms, many had already chalked up the night as simply one other disagreeable encounter with India’s emboldened proper wing.

The subsequent day, nevertheless, #shutdownJNU was trending on Twitter. Confident that that they had nothing to cover, Khalid and different pupil organizers responded to media requests for interviews. This proved a expensive mistake. That night, Khalid appeared on Times Now, a cable information channel recognized for its right-wing bias, as a part of a panel dialogue concerning the vigil.

“You are more dangerous to this country than Maoist terrorists,” screamed Arnab Goswami, the channel’s editor-in-chief on the time. “Someone is going to name you as anti-national, and I’m naming you as anti-national tonight.” Khalid, struggling to get a phrase in over Goswami’s berating, responded with a bewildered smile.

Over the following few hours, different cable channels adopted the identical rhetoric, describing the scholars as pro-Pakistan and secessionist whereas operating clips from the occasion on a loop. Khalid, together with his Muslim identify, was singled out. The channels labeled him the occasion’s “mastermind” — foreshadowing the accusations that will result in his imprisonment years later — and falsely claimed that he had visited Pakistan. They referred to as him a sympathizer of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist group, an accusation the media claimed was based mostly on an Indian authorities report. The authorities later denied the report’s existence, however not one of the information retailers issued a retraction.

“The regime wants to portray young Muslims as people influenced by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Muslim fundamentalism,” Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist and author who’s an in depth pal of Khalid’s, informed me. “By selecting Umar for persecution, the government sent out a signal to people like him.”

Within days, Modi’s residence minister, the cupboard official liable for nationwide safety, tweeted that he had ordered Delhi police to “take strong action against the anti-India elements” at JNU. The rhetoric ignited a public frenzy. Mobs of livid folks converged outdoors the college gates, the place they needed to be held again by riot police. Fearing they’d be lynched, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and different college students fled the campus.

The mainstream media’s dependence on state assist has enabled the Modi authorities to place political stress on journalists, and in consequence, most information retailers have yielded their independence. Veteran journalist Ravish Kumar — who coined the time period “Godi media,” or lapdog media, to explain pro-Modi information retailers — has direct expertise of what occurs when information retailers resist falling in line. NDTV, the place Kumar labored as managing editor, was topic to repeated raids by the earnings tax division earlier than Adani, the billionaire businessman, purchased the channel final November. On the day the buyout was made public, Kumar resigned.

“I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.”

As the mobs searching the JNU college students unfold throughout town and past, Kumar watched from the window of his house. “The atmosphere was terrifying,” he informed me. “I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.” The subsequent day, Kumar ran a black screen on his prime-time present, telling viewers, “This darkness is the picture of television today.”

The police issued wished notices and warned border authorities to not let the scholars depart the nation. On February 23, Khalid and Bhattacharya returned to campus ready to be arrested. Bhattacharya referred to what occurred subsequent as being “pulled into a social experiment.”

The Delhi police charged Khalid, Bhattacharya, and three different college students with sedition. Bhattacharya, an upper-caste Hindu, informed me that jail authorities have been baffled by his presence: “Khalid getting embroiled in these things one can understand, but why are you here, Bhattacharya sahib?”

Prison guards by no means spared a chance to taunt Khalid: “If you have to fight, why don’t you fight for reform in Islam?” He distracted himself in jail by rereading a favourite e-book that Lahiri, his companion, introduced him on a go to, Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

When the 2 mates have been launched on bail almost 4 weeks later, the JNU administration fined them for holding the vigil. Most of their fellow college students, nevertheless, welcomed them again as heroes, a response observers declared a “Student Spring.”

On the night time of his launch, Khalid gave a speech attended by 1000’s of individuals at an open-air courtyard christened Freedom Square.

“Friends,” Khalid stated when the cheers died down, “I don’t know how to put my feelings into words. Things happened so fast that even now I haven’t been able to make sense of them. I think about them every day and wonder, ‘What happened?’” The crowd roared. Khalid took a beat and switched from English to Hindi, his tone changing into severe.

“But the one thing that’s crystal clear,” he stated, “is that if the government, the RSS thought that by profiling some of us, by creating a witch hunt, that they could break us and destroy our movement and unity and courage, well, they were delusional. Today, as I stand before you, I feel even stronger than I did, and this is a huge victory for our fight.” 

“What do we want?” he shouted. “Freedom!” the group screamed again.

“It was very clear that students would play a vital role against the authoritarian regime,” Bhattacharya informed me. “And it was evident from the way the government moved that they believed the attack on JNU was going to silence students in this country for some time to come.” But for Khalid, this was solely the start.

As we chatted on the café a couple of months after his launch, Khalid was continually interrupted by well-wishers. He politely stopped speaking to reply to the “hellos” and “how are yous.” I received the sensation that after the preliminary shock had worn off, Khalid had accepted that his life could be very totally different — and that he would embrace his new function as an act of citizenship.

“People are listening to us,” he informed me. “Our task is to foreground questions that haven’t been highlighted.” His speedy aim, he stated, was to carry collectively college students, activists, Indigenous communities, and commerce unions in a broad-based “anti-fascist front.” For a second earlier than the pandemic hit, his imaginative and prescient of well-liked resistance turned a actuality. But it price him his freedom.

“How Much Has the Country Changed?”

Khalid’s highly effective campus speeches gained nationwide consideration, and shortly, he was getting invited to share his message everywhere in the nation.

But some have been bent on conserving Khalid from the rostrum. On August 13, 2018, whereas he and Lahiri have been ready for chai at a tea stall outdoors Delhi’s Constitution Club the place he was scheduled to talk, a tall, beefy man lunged at Khalid and threw him to the bottom. Lahiri and a few others hurled themselves on the assailant, however he shrugged them off and pointed a gun straight at Khalid. “The man’s face was blank,” Lahiri informed me. Suddenly, he ran away, tossing the gun.

When police retrieved the weapon, they found six reside rounds. “You’re a very lucky man,” an officer informed Khalid. “He pulled the trigger, but the gun somehow jammed.” The alleged assailant and an confederate have been later arrested however launched on bail. The subsequent yr, the assailant was backed by a political occasion with Hindu supremacist ties to run in an area meeting election, which he misplaced.

The assassination try satisfied Khalid that the one place he could be protected was in a Muslim neighborhood. Khalid stopped taking public transport, mates recalled, and he wouldn’t journey alone. He was continually trying over his shoulder. “Earlier, the threat to his life was hypothetical,” Lahiri stated. “Now it was real.”

But Khalid was undeterred from his mission to rally the plenty in opposition to Modi. During a Facebook Live occasion with the human rights activist Teesta Setalvad in January 2019, he informed viewers that Modi’s regime was based mostly on “jumlebaazi” and “nafrat,” the Hindi phrases for false guarantees and hate, respectively, including: “His government is run on lies.”

He additionally continued to face hurdles on campus. The JNU administration refused to accept Khalid’s Ph.D. thesis, successfully stopping him from receiving his diploma. The Delhi High Court intervened, and after a profitable thesis protection in August 2019, Khalid discovered himself at a free finish. He thought of making use of for a postdoctoral analysis fellowship, however he didn’t exclude the potential of changing into a politician.

“It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

“Earlier, his ideas were evolving within a university campus,” Bhattacharya informed me. “Now the canvas was much larger. It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

Bhattacharya stated Khalid wished to form how Muslim youth going through second-class citizenship envisioned their futures. “He was frustrated that the community was reduced to saying, ‘Humko bas jeene do’ — ‘Please let us just live,’” he stated. “Muslims were being lynched, so of course safety was important, but he was also trying to broaden the idea of citizenship to include other rights. He wanted people to live in full bloom.”

On the second anniversary of Khalid’s imprisonment in September 2022, I went to a public park in central Delhi to satisfy Lahiri, Khalid’s companion. It was nightfall once I arrived; a human-made lake glittered within the dwindling gentle, and birds of prey surveyed the grounds with sharp-eyed curiosity. Though Lahiri was only some minutes late, she was very apologetic. She defined that she lived in Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood about 40 minutes away, close to the place Khalid grew up. She had remained there in order that he would sooner or later have a well-recognized place to return residence to. 

Lahiri, a 39-year-old analysis scholar targeted on minority rights, was born in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, to a biology instructor and a chemist who have been members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one in every of India’s long-established left-wing political events. Lahiri was a pupil at JNU when she first met Khalid whereas counseling college students harassed by police within the aftermath of the Batla House encounter. When Khalid enrolled at JNU the next yr, the 2 reconnected. He and Lahiri helped co-found a gaggle referred to as United Against Hate after Khalid’s 2016 arrest to deal with the rising mob violence against Muslims.

“We were, like, very hot-headed radicals and all that,” Lahiri informed me with fun. “Politics was and continues to be the cornerstone of our relationship.”

Less than a yr into Modi’s second time period, the federal government handed a citizenship regulation that signaled to Indian Muslims that they have been now not welcome in their very own nation. The Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, would make it almost inconceivable for Muslim migrants to develop into residents in India. The law was twinned with a deliberate nationwide marketing campaign to drive folks already dwelling in India to show they belonged there.

Mander, the human rights advocate, referred to as the citizenship regulation the primary of its sort in India’s historical past to focus on one group. “It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution,” he informed me.

“It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution.”

The potential affect of the plan was already enjoying out within the northeastern state of Assam, which is managed by the BJP. The state, which shares a border with Muslim-majority Bangladesh, has lengthy been depicted by the precise as a hotbed of unlawful immigration. As part of the citizenship drive there, the state’s 33 million residents, lots of whom are poor, illiterate, or itinerant, needed to produce paperwork certifying their date and native land. The cruelty of this laboratory experiment turned clear when 2 million folks, together with many Muslims, have been struck off the citizenship rolls.

Declared “foreigners,” many have been despatched to detention camps inside current jails. In January 2023, news reports said that detainees could be transferred to India’s first immigration detention heart as extra such camps sprouted, creating the fearsome specter of a rustic the place Muslims are saved in cages.

Protests began in Assam and shortly unfold to the remainder of the nation. In a number of cities, the peaceable gatherings, referred to as the anti-CAA protests, have been led by college students on Muslim-majority campuses. They recited the preamble to the structure, which mandates a secular state. They unfurled the nationwide flag and shouted slogans similar to “Keep dividing, we will keep multiplying,” and “Asking questions isn’t anarchy; abusing power is.”

Days after the regulation was handed, police unleashed their arsenal on pupil protesters at Jamia Millia Islamia, a famend Muslim college in Delhi. CCTV footage showed police in riot gear storming the glass doorways of the library, the place college students have been engrossed of their work, and thrashing them with hefty bamboo sticks. One pupil was so badly wounded that he lost his left eye. In a listening to calling on the Delhi High Court to analyze the violence, a lawyer representing injured college students stated the police fired 452 tear gasoline cannons.

Lahiri informed me she might hear the firepower from her and Khalid’s house: “I felt like I was in a war zone.”

The Indian authorities imposed an internet blackout to attempt to cease the protests. Still, they continued. So many a whole bunch of individuals have been detained in Delhi that the police sought permission from town to transform a sports activities stadium into a brief jail.

As the protests and police violence raged, about 100 girls sat down to dam a predominant highway within the largely Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh. Their sit-in lasted by the night time into the morning and saved going. Every day, an increasing number of folks from everywhere in the metropolis joined them. “Hum Dekhenge,” or “We Shall See,” by the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, turned their anthem:

Underneath our toes — we the ruled.
The floor will echo like a thumping heartbeat
And the sky over the heads of the rulers
Will echo with the sound of thunder.

“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen,” Lahiri informed me. “I haven’t seen the Paris Commune, but I’ve seen Shaheen Bagh.”

Shaheen Bagh impressed sit-ins throughout the nation, and Khalid was deluged with talking invites. From December 2019 to February 2020, he spoke at nearly 70 websites.

“Seventy-two years after independence, Muslims are still being told to prove that we are patriots,” he told a crowd of protesters in Mumbai on December 27. “Even right this moment we’re informed, ‘You got Pakistan, what more do you want? You’ve divided the nation as soon as, now what would you like?’ To them I’d prefer to say, ‘We’re not Indians by likelihood. We’re Indians by selection.’’’

“The fact of us being here is proof of our patriotism. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was not our leader, is not our leader. Mahatma Gandhi is our leader. … Narendra Modi said, ‘I feel happy seeing [Muslims] wave the flag.’ Mr. Modi, the flag has been in our heart, and in our hands, since 1947. It took you people more than 50 years to raise the tricolor at the RSS headquarters. We don’t need a certificate of patriotism from you.”

“He spoke very bravely, very charismatically,” stated Mander, who generally shared the rostrum with Khalid. “He was by then a political leader with significant clout.”

The second of mass resistance was short-lived. On February 23, 2020, Kapil Mishra, a Delhi BJP chief recognized for his hateful rhetoric, incited his followers to forcibly take away girls from their protest websites if the police didn’t take motion.

“Those who clean the toilets of our homes, should we now place them on a pedestal?” he asked at a gathering of BJP supporters. “We will have to teach them a lesson.”

The subsequent day, Mishra’s followers began attacking protesters with weapons, swords, spears, and stones. The violence shortly expanded to focus on any Muslim no matter their involvement within the demonstrations, because the mob destroyed vehicles and threw petrol bombs at outlets, properties, mosques, and madrasas. Lahiri, who was in Bihar with Khalid on the time, informed me her telephone exploded with messages from mates in Delhi reporting “horrible violence.”

The subsequent day, Trump landed in India. While Trump was fêted by Modi in entrance of 100,000 folks in a stadium in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, and lunched with the prime minister on leg of lamb, mushroom curry in saffron gravy, and date halwa, 53 folks, largely Muslims, died, and greater than 500 have been injured. Many Delhi law enforcement officials both stood by or attacked Muslims themselves, in a show paying homage to the Gujarat riots 18 years earlier. The deputy commissioner of police had stood beside Mishra throughout his speech and was later seen shaking hands with members of the mob.

When police started investigating the violence, they targeted not on the perpetrators — lots of whom had been caught on digital camera or recognized by their victims — however on the protesters. Nearly 2,500 folks have been arrested, together with 17 high-profile activists who had galvanized the anti-CAA protests as organizers and audio system. Modi had described the protests as a “conspiracy against the country,” and the activists have been charged with conspiracy, in addition to sedition and homicide.

“Claiming that the violence was a conspiracy by the left and Muslim activists to create an insurrection to force a regime change is fantastical,” stated Mander, who was investigated as a part of the crackdown however not charged.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” regardless of ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers. A month after lots of the arrests, the fees in opposition to Khalid and the 17 different activists have been up to date to incorporate offenses below UAPA.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” regardless of ample proof that Mishra had whipped up his followers.

Khalid was detained on September 13, 2020. The subsequent month, the Delhi High Court rejected his attraction for bail, declaring that the fees in opposition to him have been “prima facie true.” As proof, they pointed to the truth that Khalid was in a WhatsApp group arrange by a pupil activist who had additionally been charged with conspiracy and was nonetheless in jail.

The courtroom’s choice affirmed what human rights defenders have stated all alongside about India’s terror regulation: that the cost is the punishment.

“There’s no evidence that Umar Khalid was engaged in violence,” Ganguly of Human Rights Watch stated. “So on what grounds is UAPA being used against him? Simply because he made statements the government disliked?”

Khalid refused to let his imprisonment take away his voice. In a letter published by The Wire, an Indian information web site, Khalid wrote: “On Independence Day, in the evening, I sat outside the prison cell with a few others. We saw kites flying high above our jail compound and reminisced about our childhood 15th August memories. How did we reach here? How much has the country changed?”

He spent most of his time in jail alone as a result of he’d grown weary of making an attempt to persuade fellow inmates that what they examine him within the newspapers was not true.

“Now, the sight and sound of people and traffic during my visits to court make me irritable and anxious. Far from the madding crowd, the tranquility of jail is starting to become my usual,” he wrote. “I wonder, am I getting used to captivity?”

A Taste of Freedom

One Friday afternoon in December, Lahiri was startled awake from a vivid nightmare. It was bitterly chilly in Delhi, however she was soaked in sweat. Before she might course of her dream, she realized she had solely three minutes to log into her video name with Khalid. She couldn’t miss it, or he would fear. He would suppose that now she was at risk.

Lahiri sat up in mattress and reached for her telephone. When she joined the decision, she noticed an empty chair, and her face within the small top-right window peering anxiously down on the display screen. She felt a pinprick of tension. Would the sound work? Would the web connection be steady? Would he even come? Until Khalid sat down and smiled at her, she might by no means make sure the decision would occur.

After 5 lengthy minutes, Khalid lastly appeared. He affectionately commented on her hair, matted from the nap. “Why are you looking like this?” he laughed.

She informed him about her dream. In it, the police allowed Khalid to go to JNU to satisfy his mates, and plenty of college students gathered to get a glimpse of him. How pleased they have been! But then the police, threatened by the rising crowd, chased them away, and all of the sudden, members of the ABVP, the right-wing pupil group, emerged from the fog to lynch him.

Khalid burst out laughing. But when he noticed that Lahiri wasn’t amused, he reassured her. “It’s just a dream,” he stated. “It’s not real.”

“I should be consoling him,” she informed me later, “not the other way around. But he does more of the consoling.”

The two noticed one another through video as soon as every week. Khalid was additionally entitled to a mulakat, or in-person assembly, each week at Tihar jail, the place he’s imprisoned. His household and mates divided the dates to make sure that he at all times had a customer.

Bhattacharya informed me that visiting his pal in jail evoked a variety of feelings from grief to guilt. After being arrested for sedition at JNU, he had stepped again from activism; his case is on maintain whereas the regulation is below evaluate.

“I come to the office, I have a drink with a friend, go for fieldwork, go to eat out, buy new clothes,” he stated. “Of course, there barely passes a day when I don’t think, ‘When will he come home?’ or ‘He would’ve done this,’ or ‘He would’ve loved watching this film,’ or how he is so irritating. But the clock of life hasn’t stopped for me — the way it has for him.”

Tihar is taken into account one in every of India’s progressive jails, providing inmates counseling providers, yoga lessons, and sports activities amenities. But it’s also overcrowded, with greater than 13,000 prisoners crammed into an area constructed for five,000. When Khalid first arrived, jail employees put him in a cell by himself as a substitute of the army-style barracks typical of Indian prisons. Under the pretense of security, he was locked up 24 hours a day; after 30 days, Khalid approached the Delhi High Court for aid from “practically a sort of solitary confinement.” The courtroom granted his request, and since then, he has adopted the identical routine as the opposite prisoners, who embrace an Olympian charged with murdering a fellow wrestler.

Sometimes, Khalid can’t assist however shake his head at how he ended up right here. “Kabhi kabhi, I feel like I have never even hurt a person,” he informed Lahiri throughout one other name. “I have never even, you know, injured a person. And here, there are people accused of multiple murders — and we are together, in the same space.” 

With his mother and father, Khalid is much less ruminative and extra of a jokester. On a latest name together with his mom, he quipped, “The other prisoners tell me, ‘We’re here because we killed someone, but you’re here because you did a Ph.D.’”

When Khanam requested, “And how are you, my son?” Khalid responded, “Very well, you tell me.”

“Very well? Are you on holiday in Switzerland?” Only from Khalid’s lawyer did Khanam study that her son was strip-searched prior to each courtroom look.

Khalid has tried to profit from the previous few years awaiting trial. Under the tutelage of the Olympian, he began lifting weights. He additionally returned to his old flame, cricket, and took up badminton.

Without a telephone or social media to distract him, he reads continually, borrowing books from the jail library and asking family and friends to ship extra. Lahiri estimated that he’s learn almost 200 books whereas incarcerated. He not too long ago completed Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Not Just Cricket: A Reporter’s Journey Through Modern India” by sports activities journalist Pradeep Magazine. He has crammed dozens of notebooks with musings on jail life and published 5 articles, together with a evaluate of a graphic novel about Shaheen Bagh and an obituary for the Indian historian Ranajit Guha.

After Lahiri recounted her dream, the dialog shortly moved to lighter subjects. They joked about how that they had missed two “dates,” a pun on Khalid’s courtroom dates that had not too long ago been canceled. Khalid spoke proudly about how he had stop smoking. He informed Lahiri that when he’s launched, he desires to discover ways to swim.

Khalid spoke proudly about how he had stop smoking. He informed Lahiri that when he’s launched, he desires to discover ways to swim.

The jail imposed a strict 15-minute time restrict for video calls, however Khalid typically begged for extra. Two minutes, please, he requested the police officer in cost. But in the end, it was time to go.

“Chalo ab jaana hoga,” he informed Lahiri — Now I actually should go. “Bye,” he stated, “I really like you.

“Bye, I love you,” Lahiri replied. He disappeared. The display screen was now stuffed with simply her face.

This previous winter, a Delhi district courtroom granted Khalid every week’s bail to attend his sister’s wedding ceremony. The household had deliberate three celebrations: a haldi, mehendi, and nikah. The courtroom set strict situations: Khalid might solely depart his mother and father’ home for the nikah, the Islamic wedding ceremony. He couldn’t discuss to the media or the general public. Still, Lahiri recalled wistfully, “It was wonderful.”

All his closest mates got here to see him, typically staying previous midnight. “He’s a chatterbox, so most of the time, we were listening,” Bhattacharya informed me.

For the primary 48 hours, Khalid didn’t sleep. He met his twin nieces, who have been born whereas he was in jail. He ate pizza. He rested his head on his mom’s lap and closed his eyes as she gently stroked his hair. “Ammi, I’ll only eat non-vegetarian food,” he warned her, uninterested in the jail menu of rice and dal.

Sometimes he went as much as the roof of his mother and father’ house constructing to look over town. When would he stroll the streets once more as a free man?

On the day of the nikah, Khalid wore a bespoke black sherwani, a conventional knee-length jacket, over white trousers. Lahiri and his mates stood protectively round him — he was below as a lot scrutiny from visitors because the bride herself. He was overwhelmed, Lahiri informed me. Although he loved the festivities, it was inconceivable to overlook that he was on borrowed time.

“This will be over soon,” he stated repeatedly.

An entourage of household and mates accompanied Khalid again to Tihar. When they arrived at 5 p.m., sympathetic employees informed them that for the reason that jail gates didn’t shut till 6, they might grasp round for an additional hour. The group drank chai from a avenue vendor, however nobody spoke a lot. Khalid wore black trousers and a heat sweater and carried a small duffle bag with objects he was allowed to soak up: recent garments, a second pair of studying glasses. When it was time to go, he raised his fist, a large smile on his face.

Back inside, Khalid fell right into a deep melancholy. “If you taste freedom for seven days, the ‘unfreedom’ becomes stark,” Lahiri informed me. Just a few weeks later, he was again to what had develop into his regular routine. 

Khalid periodically seems earlier than a choose for a bail listening to over whether or not he should stay incarcerated, with the following one scheduled for August 9. Eventually, a trial date might be set, stated Ganguly of Human Rights Watch, including that the fees in opposition to Khalid are unlikely to resist judicial scrutiny.

“There’s no evidence that he’s engaged in anything that could be considered a violent act against the state,” she informed me. “He’s never wielded a weapon. In fact, he’s been targeted and attacked. At some point, a judge will overturn the charges, but by then, he would have spent many years in jail.”

While they wait and hope that day comes sooner, Khalid and Lahiri will preserve competing to make one another snigger. The pleasure they’re nonetheless able to feeling, Lahiri informed me, is their resistance.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to him. How can we when the whole thing is a farce?” she stated. “But it can’t go on for eternity. It will come to an end, and until it does, we must be happy. Because if we are not, they win. So we’ve decided to be happy just as things are. And no one can take that away from us.”