Umar Khalid's case: The trial of citizen 'K'

The Umar Khalid case has become both Kafkaesque and Orwellian

Josef K is the central figure of The Trial by Franz Kafka, who is suddenly arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. I am sure that student and activist Umar Khalid, in jail since September 2020 in the conspiracy alleged by the police in the North-east Delhi riots earlier that year, would have been bewildered when in the course of a debate over his bail application, judges of the Delhi High Court questioned the words used by him at a public rally. One judge asked if it’s “proper” to use the word “jumla” for utterances of the Indian prime minister; and also questioned the words “inquilabi” and “krantikari”, both of which translate to revolutionary in English.

This was a noteworthy commentary by the courts as it seemed to be setting boundaries for the criticism of the prime minister even as it questioned the routine vocabulary of protest. It is all the more extraordinary if we note that we are living through an age where those who make genocidal hate speech that demands rape and extinction of a particular community manage bail with great alacrity.

Umar Khalid, however, appears to be our very own Citizen K, doomed to seek justice in the labyrinth of our legal system. He has also been charged under sections of the UAPA, meant to be used against terrorists but now frequently used against critics of the regime. Activists and students Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal were also arrested and charged under draconian laws in the same Delhi riots conspiracy but managed to secure bail in a superb judgement also given by the Delhi high court in June last year. One of the judges who delivered that judgement also made the remarks about Umar Khalid’s vocabulary - although when it comes to the matter of bail, there is still hope it could be granted. The bail hearing will resume after May 6.

The tragedy for Umar Khalid is not just Kafkaesque, which evokes a bureaucratic maze, but it really begins with the Orwellian process of him being described as an “Enemy of the People”. This has happened ever since an incident on the JNU campus was flagged and misrepresented by television channels and media in February 2016. Both as a Muslim and a Left activist, Umar Khalid was hissed at by TV anchors in a process eerily similar to the “two-minute hate” immortalised by George Orwell in the book 1984, which describes life inside a dystopian totalitarian state.

In the novel, the two-minute hate is a process during which the images of politically expedient enemies of the State are flashed across the screen and citizens are expected to work up to a frenzy and show their hatred towards all the so-called "treacheries, acts of sabotage, deviations".

Remarkable that Orwell should write all this in 1949, and many parts of the world, including India, should be living through it today. According to the narrative constructed around him, Umar Khalid would certainly be guilty of “thought-crime”, also described in 1984 as politically “unacceptable” thoughts and opinions, for which people could be incarcerated before any act was committed.

The case against Umar Khalid is really about a conspiracy to instigate a riot and, according to articles in Live Law, based apparently on WhatsApp groups and speeches. There is reportedly no evidence of him personally rioting, killing or even making a hate speech unless we have begun to see a politically critical protest speech against a prime minister or a law such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as illegal.

This country, after all, gained independence through protest. In fact, in the order that gave Natasha, Devangana and Asif Iqbal Tanha bail, the judges noted, “In its anxiety to suppress dissent, in the mind of the State, the line between constitutionally guaranteed right to protest and terrorist activity seems to be getting somewhat blurred. If this mindset gains traction, it would be a sad day for democracy.”

Indeed. Meanwhile, in April 2022, there was the bizarre case involving activist and MLA Jignesh Mevani, who was arrested from his home state Gujarat by the police of the BJP-ruled Assam for a tweet that they saw as disrespectful of the prime minister. Jignesh Mevani got bail once, was rearrested on the charge of assaulting a policewoman, but thankfully landed in the court of a sessions judge that saw the case as “manufactured” in order to keep him in custody and therefore an instance of “abusing the process of both the court and the law”.

Jignesh Mevani has, like Umar Khalid, been associated with Left politics, although he is currently linked to the Congress. He also happens to be a Dalit. One wonders if he would have been treated as he were if he was a caste Hindu critic of the regime. After all, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data shows that Muslim, Dalit and tribal populations are disproportionately subjected to the criminal justice system compared with other sections of society and constitute over 50 per cent of populations in jails. Similarly, we can ask if Umar Khalid, too, would meet a different fate from co-accused from different sections of society.

Indeed, as our Citizen K has been charged with conspiracy to create a riot, we need not look very far and just ask if the same stringent sections of the law would be applied to the seven men arrested in Ayodhya on April 28 for trying to create communal trouble. According to the police, they dumped torn pages of the Quran, pork meat and abuses written on paper outside four mosques in the district. The leader of the group was Mahesh Mishra, and others were identified as Pratyush Srivastava, Nitin Kumar, Deepak Kumar Gaur, Shatrughan Prajapati, Vimal Pandey and Brijesh Pandey. They have been booked under sections of the IPC that involve injuring or defiling a place of worship with intent to insult a religion. They have not been charged under the UAPA. Let’s follow their legal journey and mark the date when they get bail.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.