#UmarKhalid has been in jail with no bail, now over a year, with no evidence attached to his alleged crime. Today is his birthday!
JNU student activist Umar Khalid has been in jail since 13 September 2020 for allegedly being one of the conspirators of the February 2020 anti-Muslim riots in Delhi. No evidence but no bail. Today is his birthday.
Ashok Swain, a professor tweets, “JNU student activist Umar Khalid has been in jail since 13 September 2020 for allegedly being one of the conspirators of the February 2020 anti-Muslim riots in Delhi. No evidence but no bail. Today is his birthday.”
JNU student activist Umar Khalid has been in jail since 13 September 2020 for allegedly being one of the conspirators of the February 2020 anti-Muslim riots in Delhi. No evidence but no bail. Today is his birthday.
— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) August 11, 2022
In the speech that got him arrested, this is what he said, “When Donald Trump comes to India on 24 February, we will say that the Prime Minister and the government of India are trying to divide the country. They are destroying the values of Mahatma Gandhi, and the people of India are fighting against them. If those in power want to divide India, the people of India are ready to unite the country,” Khalid can be heard saying in the speech.
“We won’t respond to violence with violence. We won’t respond to hate with hate. If they spread hate, we will respond to it with love. If they thrash us with lathis, we keep holding the tricolour,” he says in his speech.
His speech was allegedly morphed and manipulated to make it look as if he was spreading division and he has been in jail since 13 September 2020.
May the courts remember Umar Khalid and give him justice.
Who is Umar Khalid?
Umar Khalid (born Syed Umar Khalid) was born in Jamia Nagar, New Delhi, and has lived there for the last 30 years. His father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, is from Maharashtra, while his mother is from Western Uttar Pradesh. S.Q.R. Ilyas is the National President of the Welfare Party of India and a former member of the Students Islamic Movement of India, a banned organisation, which he left in 1985.
He is an Indian activist, a former student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, former leader of the Democratic Students’ Union (DSU) in JNU.
He was allegedly involved in the Jawaharlal Nehru University sedition row and is an accused under the UAPA law. Khalid is also associated with United Against Hate (UAH), a campaign founded along with Nadeem Khan in July 2017 in response to the series of lynchings.
Umar Khalid studied history at the Kirori Mal College of Delhi University and later did his master’s and MPhil in history at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He describes himself as a hardcore communist who is not a practising Muslim.
Khalid’s PhD thesis was titled “Contesting claims and contingencies of the rule on Adivasis of Jharkhand” and was submitted to the JNU in 2018.[15][16] Following his PhD, he published a research article titled “Changing Village Authority in an Adivasi Hinterland: State, Community and Contingencies of Rule in Singhbhum, 1830–1897” in the journal Social Scientist in 2018.
Why did They Arrest Umar Khalid?
On 9 February 2016, students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) held a protest on their campus against the capital punishment meted out to the 2001 Indian Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, and Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhat. [18]
Four days after the event, the Delhi Police arrested JNU Student Union president Kanhaiya Kumar on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy.[19] Five other students including Umar Khalid went into hiding. After their return 10 days later, Umar Khaled and Anirban Bhattacharya were also taken into custody.
The arrest and the use of sedition charges were heavily condemned as suppression of political dissent An investigation committee appointed by the administration of JNU distributed varying punishments to a number of students. Kanhaiya Kumar was fined 10,000 rupees, and Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya were rusticated for one semester. In fact, JNU refused to allow Umar Khalid to submit his PhD thesis in July 2018. When Khalid went to the Delhi High Court and obtained an order allowing him to submit his thesis, in August 2018, JNU accepted the PhD thesis submission.
On 28 February 2020, the Delhi government gave its approval for a trial in the sedition case.
In 2018, he was booked for the Bhima Koregaon violence where it was alleged that he along with Jignesh Mevani gave provocative’ speeches in Pune. The criminal charges against Mevani and Khalid were for promoting enmity between different groups through their speeches. The Elgaar Parishad rally, where this reportedly happened, was held in Pune to mark the 200th year of the Battle of Koregaon, a place in the present-day Pune district, which was fought between the then British Indian Army and the Peshwas.
On 13 August 2018, Khalid narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. The two accused were arrested on 20 August 2018 by police from Fatehabad, Haryana. Before the arrest, the accused had uploaded a video on Facebook on 15 August, saying the attack was an Independence Day gift for India, and they also wanted to highlight the issue of cow protection.
In the 2020 Delhi riots, Umar Khalid was booked under UAPA by Delhi Police for his alleged “provocative speeches” during the visit of American President Donald Trump to India. Delhi police considered his speeches as instigating and facilitating the 2020 Delhi riots. On 14 September 2020, Khalid was arrested by the Delhi Police Special Cell as an alleged conspirator in the Delhi Riots case.
In charge sheets related to the riots, the police have said Khalid met suspended and jailed Aam Aadmi Party’s councillor Tahir Hussain and activist Khalid Saifi on 8 January at the Shaheen Bagh sit-in protest site against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)-National Register of Citizens (NRC) to allegedly plan the riots. He was interrogated twice for his alleged role. The police also linked Khalid’s speeches to the riots. The Delhi Police’s special cell is looking into a larger conspiracy case in addition to multiple cases filed in connection with the riots.[44]
While Umar Khalid filed a bail plea in July 2021, after an eight-month-long hearing his bail application was dismissed. In the bail order, the court said that the allegations against Khalid are prima facie true and his role in the “context of conspiracy” related to the Delhi riots was apparent. In March 2022, the court denied bail to Khalid. An Additional Sessions Judge Amitabh Rawat stated that Khalid’s plea had “no merit and substance” for the bail to be granted.
He believes, “No one has the right to take someone’s life. But it is the duty of everyone to save another’s life.”
Umar Khalid As a Person
He believes that no one has the right to take a life. He worries about the poor sleeping hungry and asks, “Is there a limit to being rich? At a time when 200 million people sleep hungry in the country, shouldn’t there be a cap on luxury?”
It disturbs him to think that though he became a leader because he had the opportunity to get educated, the boys and girls in his neighbourhood with whom he spent his childhood, some of whom were quite intelligent, and millions of others like them, are deteriorating across thousands of such neighbourhoods.
He never taught violence to his followers. He was bold, courageous, and willing to take the consequences of being arrested.
It is said he speaks a lot, think energetic with painful eyes, and is deeply sensitive to the troubles around him.
It is unfortunate that he has been in jail for so long with no evidence of a crime committed by him. The Delhi Riots as one can recall were instigated by slogans by a political leader Anurag Thakur who ultimately got a political promotion. Let us hope the courts will take cognisance of Umar Khalid in jail and set him free before Independence Day. The brave warriors of justice should never be in chains