During the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests in India last month, a demonstrator in Goa appeared with a placard reading “Free Umar Khalid”, an act that later led to police action. Indian right-wing media outlets framed the broader CJP movement through its association with Khalid, one of the most defiant faces of opposition to India’s current far-right political order, as well as with other jailed activists.
The controversy demonstrated that six years of imprisonment have failed to erase Khalid from India’s political imagination. He remains capable of reaching young Indians who never knew him personally.
August 11 marks Khalid’s 39th birthday, and his sixth in jail, without a trial in the case that has kept him incarcerated.
For Khalid, however, the story of these six birthdays began long before the prison gates closed behind him.
It began with a microphone, a university campus, a series of speeches and, eventually, a warning he recorded because he was convinced the state was coming for him.
It was August 2020. Khalid had turned 33 just days earlier.
He had spent the night at his close friend Anirban Bhattacharya’s apartment, celebrating his birthday late with a chocolate cake. But there was little celebration left in him by morning. He had barely slept, smoked heavily through the night and was visibly tense.
Then he switched on a phone camera.
“If you’re watching this video,” he said, “it means that I’ve been arrested.”
He had reason to believe that arrest was imminent.
Months earlier, Delhi had been rocked by communal violence that left at least 53 people dead, most of them Muslims. Khalid was nowhere near Delhi when the violence erupted. He was in another part of India, speaking at a protest and urging people not to answer hate with hate. Yet as the police investigation into the violence progressed, he and other prominent anti-CAA activists were increasingly portrayed as masterminds of a wider conspiracy.
The campaign against him had already begun in the media.
In March, Amit Malviya, then head of the BJP’s IT cell, shared a video of a speech Khalid had delivered in Amravati before US President Donald Trump’s visit to India. Malviya raised the question of whether the Delhi violence had been planned in advance by what he called the “Tukde Tukde gang”. That question was rapidly transformed by television channels and right-wing portals into an assertion of Khalid’s guilt.
“After Malviya’s video, and the right-wing media’s campaign, I was expecting to be questioned. I was mentally prepared to be arrested back in March and April,” he told Newslaundry shortly before his arrest.
“They have a predetermined theory and they want to vindicate it by sidelining the facts,” he said.
“I am sure that when I am arrested, there will be fake stories about me in the press,” he told Newslaundry.
Dayes later, the police came for him, on September 13, 2020.
Khalid was not new to being turned into a national villain.
His first major confrontation with the Indian state came in 2016, when he was a doctoral student at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
After a campus event commemorating Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri man executed over his alleged role in the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, television channels descended on JNU. Khalid became one of their principal targets.
He was called anti-national. He was accused of being sympathetic to militants. Television anchor Arnab Goswami told him on air that he was more dangerous to India than Maoist terrorists. Claims that Khalid had visited Pakistan and had links to Jaish-e-Mohammed circulated in the media, even though the government later denied the existence of the intelligence report cited to support one such claim.
Khalid was arrested on sedition charges and spent nearly four weeks in jail.
When he returned to JNU, thousands gathered to hear him speak.
The experience did not silence him. It enlarged his role.
“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,” he told the crowd.
“What do we want?”
“Freedom,” the crowd answered.
That moment offered a preview of what Khalid would become over the next few years.
The Citizenship Amendment Act changed the scale of his politics.
As protests spread across India, Khalid became one of their most recognisable speakers. From December 2019 to February 2020, he spoke at almost 70 protest sites.
At a rally in Mumbai, he told Muslims who were repeatedly asked to prove their patriotism: “We’re not Indians by chance. We’re Indians by choice.”
It was a message that resonated well beyond the immediate anti-CAA movement.
Khalid was not simply asking Muslims to defend themselves. He was trying to broaden the language of citizenship: to move beyond the demand to be allowed merely to survive and towards the demand to live as equal citizens.
His speeches, his arrest and the campaign against him gradually turned him into something larger than a student activist.
To the Indian government and its supporters, he became “a conspirator” and, in some of the most aggressive media coverage, “a terrorist”.
To many young Indians, particularly those who encountered his speeches before they encountered the allegations against him, he became “a symbol of dissent”.
That divide has only deepened during his years in prison.
Khalid’s case also illustrates how political labelling can precede, and potentially shape, legal proceedings.
The Newslaundry interview he gave shortly before his arrest is striking today because of how clearly he anticipated what would follow.
“They don’t have any evidence against me. They have to invent the evidence,” he said.
He predicted that the media would produce stories against him once he was arrested and argued that the police were attempting to construct a public narrative before establishing the facts.
That concern had already been visible in 2016. The same cycle appeared again in 2020: a political accusation, selective video clips, television debates, anonymous or police-sourced claims, and increasingly severe labels.
The term “Godi media”, popularised by journalist Ravish Kumar to describe outlets he regarded as excessively deferential to the Modi government, became part of the vocabulary of this wider debate over Indian journalism. The Intercept’s reporting on Khalid described how the media campaign against dissidents often preceded their imprisonment, helping turn them into public enemies before they reached court.
It is important, however, to distinguish between outlets and evidence. Not every Indian publication that reported on Khalid can fairly be placed in the same category. The record instead shows a more specific pattern: BJP political messaging, particularly from its IT apparatus, was amplified by sections of the television and digital media ecosystem, while other outlets challenged, scrutinised or simply reported the allegations.
The effect of the campaign was nonetheless profound.
By the time Khalid entered Tihar Jail, a large section of the public had already been given an image of him: “terrorist”, “anti-national”, “conspirator”.
His mother, Sabiha Khanam, captured the human contradiction in a single question:
“My son had a bright future. 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.’ And he’s the one they call a terrorist?”
Khalid had predicted another thing before his arrest: that the process itself would become the punishment.
Nearly six years later, that prediction has become central to his story.
He has not been convicted of the allegations against him. His bail applications have repeatedly been denied, while proceedings have dragged on.
In 2022, the Delhi High Court rejected his bail plea, holding that the accusations against him were prima facie true. His supporters and rights groups have strongly criticised his prolonged detention, while the authorities maintain that the case concerns serious allegations of conspiracy and terrorism.
The legal dispute remains unresolved.
But prison has changed him in ways that have little to do with courtroom arguments.
In his first interview since his arrest, conducted by The Guardian through family and friends because the newspaper could not meet him inside Tihar Jail, Khalid described prison as a place where time itself becomes an adversary.
He spoke about sunset.
That is when the prison becomes hardest, he said, because another day of life has disappeared.
He remembered Dostoevsky writing about the same feeling in prison more than 150 years ago.
“I guess maybe it is because it starts sinking in that another day of your life has been spent in captivity,” he said.
Six birthdays now carry that same weight.
The most striking part of Khalid’s recent Guardian interview was not his discussion of politics.
It was his discussion of being turned into an image.
For years, he has existed in public life as competing symbols: to one side, a dangerous anti-national; to another, a political prisoner and symbol of resistance.
Khalid said both versions could become dehumanising.
“When you are reduced to just an image, either negative or positive, it becomes difficult to maintain not just your humanity but even your sanity at times,” he told the Guardian.
He said prison had taken a toll on his mind and body and intensified his anxieties.
Then came the sentence that perhaps best captures the strange tragedy of his imprisonment:
“Humanity is a privilege that is not granted to people like me.”
It is a remarkable statement from someone who spent years insisting that citizenship should mean something more than simply being permitted to exist.
Khalid’s friends have grown older. His family has changed. His twin nieces were born while he was in prison.
His sister got married.
For seven days, he was allowed to leave prison to attend the wedding. He ate pizza, rested his head on his mother’s lap, met his nieces and spent time with friends he had not seen freely in years.
Then he returned to Tihar.
One friend described the contrast simply to The Intercept: his own life continued — work, drinks with friends, films, fieldwork, new clothes — while Khalid’s seemed to have stopped.
For Khalid himself, those seven days of freedom were almost cruel.
“If you taste freedom for seven days,” his partner Banojyotsna Lahiri said, “the ‘unfreedom’ becomes stark.”
Back inside, he fell into a deep depression.
Yet he continued to read. Nearly 200 books, according to Lahiri. He filled notebooks. He wrote essays and reviews. He quit smoking. He returned to cricket and took up badminton. He told Lahiri that when he was finally released, he wanted to learn how to swim.
It is in these small details that the six-year story becomes less about an activist and more about a person.
A man who misses his family.
A man who wants to swim.
A man who jokes with his mother.
A man who still wants to write.
A man who has spent years waiting for his life to resume.
That contradiction has followed Khalid far beyond India.
His name has become known across South Asia and among international human rights circles. His imprisonment has drawn solidarity from activists, academics and politicians abroad, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In his recent Guardian interview, Khalid spoke not as someone who had abandoned his political convictions but as someone who believed that silence would amount to surrender.
“Silence emboldens this regime,” he said, criticising India’s political opposition and civil society for failing to speak forcefully enough about political prisoners.
The latest CJP protest demonstrated that, for some, he has become a hero.
For his critics, he continues to represent a “dangerous political ideology”.
Either way, the state has failed to make him invisible.