The label arrives first
Six years is a long time to be held for something you have not yet been charged with.
Umar Khalid has been in a cell since the thirteenth of September 2020. Sharjeel Imam since August of the same year. In all that time no charge has been framed against them. There has been no trial. There has been no verdict. There has been a chargesheet running to hundreds of pages, and there have been bail hearings, and there have been adjournments, and there have been judges who reserved their orders and judges who delivered them, and there has been the slow administrative hum of a system doing something that looks from a distance like law. But there has been no trial. They have simply been kept. The keeping is the point, and the keeping is the sentence, and the sentence was passed long before either of them saw the inside of a courtroom.
It was passed on television.
This is the part that gets lost when people write about India's political prisoners as though the prison were the beginning of the story. It is not the beginning. It is the fourth or fifth stage of a process that starts in a studio, and the process is so regular by now, so well rehearsed, so visible to anyone who cares to look, that you can set your watch by it.
First the category has to be manufactured. A person cannot simply be arrested for opposing a citizenship law, because opposing a citizenship law is what citizens in a democracy are permitted to do. So the person must first be moved out of the category of citizen and into some other category, and this is where the nine o'clock hour does its work. Anti-national. Tukde-tukde gang. Urban Naxal. Jihadi. Foreign funded. Andolanjivi, a coinage of the Prime Minister's own, meaning one who lives off protest, as though the desire not to be stripped of one's papers were a career choice. These words are not descriptions. They are preparations. They are said on Monday and repeated on Tuesday and repeated again on Wednesday with a graphic and a countdown clock, and by Friday they have stopped sounding like accusations and started sounding like facts, and a fact does not require evidence. It only requires repetition and a large enough audience.
Then the violence comes, and the inversion happens.
In February 2020, in the north east of Delhi, fifty-three people were killed and more than seven hundred were injured, and most of the dead belonged to the community that had spent the preceding months being named on television. This is a matter of record. What is also a matter of record is what happened next. The state did not conclude that the people who had been attacked were the victims of the attack. It concluded that the protest against the citizenship law had itself been the conspiracy, that the sit-ins organised by students and by grandmothers in Shaheen Bagh had been the preparatory stage of a terrorist plot, and it registered FIR 59 of 2020, and it filled that FIR with the names of the people who had been named on the screen. The accused were the accused because they had been named. They had been named because they had protested. They had protested because they were about to be made stateless. It is a perfect circle, and everybody inside it is holding a microphone.
Meanwhile there is the other side of the ledger, and the other side is very short.
Speeches were delivered in the weeks before the violence, some of them within sight of senior police officers, in which crowds were told what would happen if the roads were not cleared. Nobody was arrested for those. Five years passed. Then in April 2025 a magistrate in Delhi looked at a complaint from a resident of Yamuna Vihar, found that a prima facie cognisable offence existed, and ordered an investigation into the role of a serving minister of the Delhi government. The investigation was stayed within days, on an application by the minister himself. The police, for their part, had already told the court that he had no role at all and that a plan had been hatched to shift the blame onto him. So we have a country in which students who marched are held for six years without charges being framed, and a politician for whom a court found a prima facie case gets a stay order in a fortnight. This is not a failure of the system. A failure would imply that the system was trying to do something else.
The instrument that holds it all together is the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, and it is worth being precise about what this law actually does, because the horror of it is technical rather than dramatic. Under section 43D(5), a court may refuse bail if, on reading the police case, it appears prima facie true. The accused is not permitted at that stage to lead evidence showing that it is false. The chargesheet is treated as true because it exists. And since the trial may not begin for half a decade, the effect is that the state can take years of a person's life on the strength of an allegation it has never had to prove. The Solicitor General put the philosophy plainly while arguing against these very bail applications in the Delhi High Court, saying that anyone acting against the nation had better remain in jail until acquitted. The sentence has the great virtue of honesty. Guilt is not the question. Time is the punishment.
And time is what is being administered, on a scale that the numbers make impossible to misread. Between 2015 and 2020, more than eight thousand people were arrested under this law. Two hundred and thirty five were convicted. In May of this year the Supreme Court itself, citing the national crime figures, observed that the conviction rate under the Act between 2019 and 2023 ran between two and six per cent, which is to say that ninety four to ninety eight of every hundred people put through it are eventually found to have done nothing, and that in Jammu and Kashmir the figure is under one per cent. A law with a two per cent conviction rate is not a law for convicting people. It is a law for holding them, and everyone in the building knows it.
Which brings us to the courts, and to the most demoralising sequence of all.
On the fifth of January this year the Supreme Court refused bail to Khalid and Imam while granting it to five of their co-accused in the same alleged conspiracy. On the eighteenth of May a different bench of the same court, hearing a different matter, held that even under this Act bail is the rule and jail the exception, and said that the January ruling had diluted a binding judgment of a larger bench. And on the fourth of July a trial court refused bail again, on the ground that it was bound by January. So the highest court in the country has now said, in the space of five months, both that these men may be held and that men like them may not be, and the men remain held, and the charges remain unframed. A judiciary that contradicts itself and leaves the prisoner inside is not merely weak. It has become part of the machinery it exists to check.
The list is long and the list is not abstract. Gulfisha Fatima walked out in January after more than five years. Siddique Kappan spent twenty eight months inside for the offence of driving towards Hathras with a notebook. Khurram Parvez has been held since November 2021 for documenting what the state does in Kashmir. Father Stan Swamy, eighty four years old, with Parkinson's, denied a straw to drink with, died in custody in July 2021 while waiting to be heard.
And none of it, not one stage of it, works without the studio.
This is the thing I want to insist on, because it is the thing that is always treated as background. The FIR needs a label, and the label is manufactured on television. The prosecutor's theory of a conspiracy needs a public that already believes a conspiracy existed, and that belief is manufactured on television. The judge who reads the chargesheet and finds it prima facie true is a citizen of a country in which these names have been enemies for six years, and that enmity was manufactured on television. Godi media is not reporting on this pathway. It is not commenting on it or cheering it from the sidelines. It is the first stage of it, the stage without which none of the others can proceed, and it should be described that way in every account of how India's prisoners of conscience came to be where they are.
Which is why what happened at Jantar Mantar matters more than a bad week for a few anchors. When a generation refuses the microphone, films everything, and builds its own record faster than the studio can build a story, it is not settling a media grievance. It is attacking the first stage. Break the manufacture of the label and the rest of the chain has nothing to hold on to.
They are still inside. The label got there first. It is still the only thing the state has.