Time and punishment: Film traces student activist Umar Khalid’s years without bail
Khalid has lost four-and-a-half years to Tihar Jail. A documentary traces his story through the lives and spaces from which he has gone missing.
Filmmaker Lalit Vachani, 60, has never met Umar Khalid, but feels like he has known him for years.
In a sense, he has. Vachani spent 16 months making a movie about the life of the student activist who was arrested exactly four-and-a-half years ago, in September 2020, for allegedly conspiring to incite the Delhi riots of that year.
Khalid has been held without bail under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), for allegedly inciting the riots with his words.
The evidence against him, police have said, consists of a range of eyewitness statements.
More evidence points to chats on a WhatsApp group (about organising protests on certain streets, in the weeks before the riots; Khalid was not in Delhi when they broke out).
There is proof of calls, police say, made to Khalid by others accused in the conspiracy, when the riots began. And there is his presence at various protest marches.
The police say he made speeches calling for revolution, and add that unnamed witnesses have said he allegedly supported the overthrow of the Narendra Modi government. Khalid has denied all charges.
In the years since he was arrested, aged 33, protests have been held demanding he be granted bail (as others have been, under UAPA). Amnesty International has called the denial of bail a “huge blow to everyone exercising their rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly in the country”.
In hearings where other alleged conspirators were granted bail, meanwhile, the Delhi High Court observed that “in its anxiety to suppress dissent”, the State appeared to be blurring the line between “the constitutionally guaranteed right to protest and terrorist activity”.
Khalid remains at Delhi’s Tihar Jail. “His spirit remains unbroken,” Vachani says.
Zooming out
Vachani’s documentary is called Prisoner No. 626710 is Present. It tells the story of Khalid’s lost years, through the spaces and lives from which he has gone missing.
Much of the one-hour runtime features his partner of 12 years, Banojyotsna Lahiri, a senior researcher with the think-tank Centre for Equity Studies.
The two met in 2008, while he was studying for an Arts degree at Delhi University and she for a Master’s in Philosophy. They began dating in 2013.
By 2016, Khalid was pursuing a PhD at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
It was at this point that he was first arrested, during a protest led by the student political leader Kanhaiya Kumar. He was among those charged with sedition (a colonial-era law that has since been suspended temporarily by the Supreme Court, with all cases filed under it now being held in abeyance).
They were protesting the capital punishment meted out to Afzal Guru (in the 2001 Indian Parliament attack case) and to the Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhat. Khalid was among those released on bail.
Vachani would next hear of him when fresh protests broke out in 2019, against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC).
As the Shaheen Bagh sit-ins stretched out, amid a range of other protests across the city, Vachani’s research team began to record footage. Among the clips used in the film, one sees Khalid making a speech, squaring off against Arnab Goswami on Republic TV.
The film, made with funding from the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at Germany’s University of Gottingen, where Vachani is also a lecturer and researcher, was completed in 2023. It has been doing the rounds in non-theatrical screenings (at universities and community centres). Vachani recently completed one such tour of the US and Canada.
Through it all, the two men have never met. Khalid is allowed one in-person visit a week, the filmmaker says. This led him to decide, early on, that he would not attempt to hijack one such day for his documentary.
In the film, Lahiri talks about the strange, indefatigable hope that keeps him going.
But when they meet, she adds, they don’t discuss his prospects of being free. “What’s the point? If someone was sentenced to a certain number of years, you could count down to it…”
Khalid spends a lot of his time in prison reading, Lahiri says. Friends collect books for her to hand over. When he is done with one, he hands it back. On shelves that have grown up in the house around her, the books he has read in isolation return home.
Chapter two?
Vachani is hoping Khalid will return home too. “I hope for Umar to be released very soon. Then I can make another film, where I can show him in his natural context, going about life. Meeting his friends. Spending unmonitored time with his family... a kind of sequel,” he says.
Prisoner No. 626710 is Present is Vachani’s third documentary. His first, The Boy in the Branch (1993), told the story of the stories, games and rituals that are used to train young boys at the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur. It was followed by a sequel, The Men in the Tree (2002), with more on the organisation’s training methods.
