On September 13, Umar Khalid will have spent five years in prison without trial. His alleged crime? Dissent.
Once a leading voice of India’s student movements, Khalid was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for speeches opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA)—a law that many feared could strip millions of Indian Muslims of citizenship when paired with the National Register of Citizens. For those speeches, he has languished in Delhi’s Tihar Jail while bail hearings stretch endlessly, adjourned over a dozen times, with judges reserving orders for weeks or months only to deny relief.
Khalid’s PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University focused on tribal movements for dignity and political rights. From prison, he writes not with rage but with the quiet clarity of someone learning a new language of time. In July, reflecting on Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, he wrote: “We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.” Few phrases better capture the purgatory of indefinite detention without trial.
This is not an isolated distortion. It reflects a deeper democratic transformation in India: dissent redefined as danger, and legality repurposed as punishment.
From a Culture of Argument to a Culture of Fear
To grasp the depth of this reversal, recall a different India. Before 2014, its democracy was noisy, flawed, and often unjust—but it had a vital grammar of dissent. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) symbolized that ethos: a campus that resisted Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, incubated the Ambedkarite approach to the liberation of marginalized communities, and taught generations that intellectual combat was integral to citizenship.
That culture began to curdle after Narendra Modi’s rise to power. The 2016 sedition case against JNU students—Khalid among them—was a watershed moment. A campus debate was reframed as a national security crisis; the term “anti-national” entered prime-time television as both insult and indictment. The message was unmistakable: student activism, once inconvenient but legitimate, was now criminal.
This coincided with a systematic assault on academic autonomy. Public universities saw vice-chancellors double as ideological enforcers; faculty appointments became politicized. Police entered campuses to quell protests at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University during the anti-CAA movement. Private universities, long considered safe havens, eventually faced similar pressures. The 2023 Ashoka University controversy—where economist Sabyasachi Das resigned after backlash over a working paper on possible electoral manipulation—was emblematic. If elite, donor-funded institutions could be disciplined for research, who was beyond reach?
Of course, this pattern is not uniquely Indian. Across the globe since 2016, student movements have faced escalating repression. In France, riot police stormed campuses during anti-labour law protests. In Turkey, the Boğaziçi University protests against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s appointed rector were crushed with mass arrests. In Hong Kong, students who spearheaded the Umbrella Movement were handed draconian sentences under the National Security Law. In the United States, student-led protests—from Black Lives Matter sit-ins to Gaza solidarity encampments—have drawn militarized policing and surveillance, with Columbia and UCLA witnessing scenes that echoed authoritarian states. Everywhere, the campus—once a laboratory of dissent—has become a frontline of control.
In India, Modi’s playbook relies less on overt spectacle and more on legal attrition—but the animus is similar: universities are dangerous because they teach the habit of doubt.
The Long Emergency
Khalid’s ordeal is a case study in what anthropologist Alpa Shah calls “punishment by process” in her book The Incarcerations. Shah reconstructs the Bhima Koregaon case, in which Indian authorities branded 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16)—lawyers, poets, professors—as Maoists in 2018 on the basis of allegedly planted evidence. Their true offence, however, was to speak for Dalits, Adivasis (indigenous tribes), and minorities. Like the BK-16, Khalid faces not a single spectacular injustice but an infinite series of banal ones: adjournments, recusals, sealed evidence. The form of law survives; its substance collapses.
The UAPA is the linchpin of this system. First weaponized after the 2012 anti-corruption protests through expanded surveillance powers, it was hardened in 2019 to let the state label individuals as terrorists—making bail virtually impossible. This law converts liberty into a privilege the executive can suspend indefinitely. It is not designed to convict but to incapacitate.
The siege extends beyond prisons. On August 5—the anniversary of Kashmir’s autonomy revocation—25 books were banned in the region for “glorifying terrorism,” including works by Arundhati Roy, Anuradha Bhasin and A.G. Noorani. From banning narratives to disciplining research, the state now polices not just action but interpretation.
These actions echo the anti-democratic practices during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule, a period of 21 months between 1975 and 1977 in which many of India’s constitutional protections and individual freedoms had been suspended—for the only time in the country’s post-Independence history. This has led some commentators to draw historical parallels and to call Modi’s rule “the Long Emergency” or the “undeclared Emergency,” implying that Modi is attempting similar repression, only through more subtle means.
Protests that Shook the State
India has not gone quietly. Two mass movements since 2019 proved its democratic muscle memory: the anti-CAA protests and the farmers’ agitation.
The anti-CAA protests were astonishingly organic and plural. Shaheen Bagh—a sit-in led by Muslim women through Delhi’s winter—became a symbol of constitutional resistance. Students, workers, artists, and grandmothers held night-long vigils, debating citizenship and secularism in the open. Its horizontalism mirrored, in spirit, the pro-Palestine encampments at Columbia and other U.S. campuses last year: improvised democracies under siege, where tents turned into classrooms and kitchens into communes. Both movements faced vilification as “anarchic,” both endured state crackdowns, and both revealed how fragile and powerful collective defiance can be.
Then came the farmers. What began as protests against three farm laws metastasized into months-long encampments at Delhi’s borders—Singhu, Tikri, Ghazipur. Singhu was not just a protest site; it became a self-organizing city with community kitchens feeding thousands, libraries circulating books, and clinics offering care. This infrastructure of solidarity eventually forced a rare government retreat: in November 2021, the farm laws were repealed. Likewise, the NRC-CAA process was kicked into the long grass and its most cruel provisions cancelled.
These victories were real—but they carried paradoxical costs. Precisely because they showed that organized, non-violent resistance could compel reversals, they triggered a state strategy of pre-emption: anticipatory arrests, financial throttling of NGOs, and the framing of activism as conspiracy. The Bhima Koregaon case was the rehearsal. Umar Khalid is the sequel.
The Global Mirror
India is hardly alone in hollowing out dissent through law. France crushed the gilets jaunes with sweeping police powers. Germany has targeted climate activists as members of a “criminal organization,” enabling raids and preventive detention. Britain’s 2022 Public Order Act criminalizes “disruptive” protest with alarming vagueness, granting police discretion that civil-liberties advocates call unprecedented. In the United States, Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses drew mass arrests and political threats to defund universities. Democracies today rarely collapse in coups; they corrode through the normalization of the repressive “exception.”
Elsewhere, the system sometimes bends without breaking. Julian Assange spent 12 years in limbo—seven inside Ecuador’s embassy, five in Belmarsh—before a plea deal ended his confinement. Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. permanent resident and Columbia graduate, was detained for 104 days over pro-Palestine activism before a court ruled his confinement unconstitutional. In India, by contrast, silence is the system. There is no plea deal, no national outcry, no debate in Parliament—only an indefinite present.
A New Wave
The political terrain has shifted once more. In the 2024 general election, the BJP under Narendra Modi retained power but suffered its sharpest setback in a decade—losing its outright majority for the first time since 2014. Many read this as a rupture in its aura of inevitability, proof that India’s democratic pulse, though faint, still beats. India Today’s most recent Mood of the Nation survey shows a 12 percent decline in Modi’s favorability ratings from its 2021 peak and a precipitous 10 percent crash in approval ratings for his coalition government since February 2025.
But electoral shocks, unless they amount to complete regime change, rarely rewrite the deep grammar of power. The infrastructure of repression remains in place: UAPA cases frozen in limbo, bail hearings deferred without reason, and trials postponed to ensure that the process itself—and unending time—become punishment. For Umar Khalid, these continuities matter more than parliamentary seats won.
On September 2, 2025, nearly five years later, the trial court was yet to frame the charges against him, and a Delhi High Court bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Shalinder Kaur declared, with Kafkaesque bureaucratic coldness, “All appeals are dismissed.” No explanations, no complicated legal arguments, just indefinite incarceration without trial.
However, protests stir again. In August 2025, Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Indian parliament launched the Voter Adhikar Yatra (Voter Rights March)—a 1,300-kilometer march across the state of Bihar. The march alleges that the Election Commission colluded in a campaign of coordinated fraud in the June 2024 general election and is engaged in mass disenfranchisement via a Special Intensive Revision. The latter is being challenged in the courts as well. He called it “vote chori” (Hindi for “vote theft”). Demonstrators from Araria to Bhagalpur echoed the charge, chanting “vote chor, gaddi chhod” (“vote thief, step down”).
This march-pilgrimage, in tone and architecture, recalls Shaheen Bagh and the Singhu border: improvised democracies of tents and songs, pop-up republics that insist the Constitution still matters. Indeed, just like Rahul Gandhi himself, these protesters often signal defiance against the Modi government by holding up pocket copies of the Indian constitution. Umar Khalid, during the 2020 anti-CAA movement, did so as well and quoted from Mahatma Gandhi’s and Dr. Ambedkar’s speeches at length. It speaks to an interesting paradox, where India’s protest movements remain as fiercely nationalistic as Modi’s Hindutva, though theirs in the inclusive nationalism of Indian independence movement and the first few decades of independent India, with its overtly socialist, secular, and liberal-democratic ethos.
Nor is Bihar the only site of defiance. In Kerala, Gaza solidarity marches cut across faith lines. At Hyderabad Central University, students occupied green tracts to block deforestation. In Kolkata, thousands poured out after a brutal rape case, refusing the normalization of violence against women. These are not mass upheavals yet—but neither were the first winter tents at Shaheen Bagh.
Institutional flickers exist too. In May, historian Ali Khan Mahmudabad—detained for an opinion piece—was released within days, a contrast to Khalid’s unending limbo. On August 22, the Supreme Court granted swift relief to The Wire.in’s editors in a sedition-style case, a rare assertion of press freedom. On August 29, it also questioned the racial profiling of Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims, who have been harassed in recent months by ICE-like raids on undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants. In Manipur, where ethnic violence spiralled for months, chief minister N. Biren Singh resigned under public and political pressure—an admission, however reluctant, that accountability still claims ground.
These ruptures show that India’s democratic impulse is bruised but not dead. But they also teach something else: resistance, when it succeeds, breeds a harder state. The lesson for citizens is the opposite—organization, not outrage, is the antidote to fear. Silence is what power counts on; speech—however fragile—is its only rival.
Khalid has said he is “afraid of hope,” because the fall can be cruel. But hope is not optimism; it is labor. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History during his nine years in the jails of the British Raj, imprisoned for his participation in the Indian struggle for freedom, because he believed history was still being made in captivity. Khalid reads Dostoevsky for the same reason, while his own PhD explored India’s most dispossessed communities. That a student from a university named after Nehru now languishes in prison for defending the secular republic Nehru envisioned is not only a bitter irony—it is a warning. Freedom, in such times, is not a gift from the state but a habit we must refuse to lose—even when the cost of keeping it feels infinite.