Dissent on Trial: Six Years On, Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam Are Still Waiting for a Verdict

A Bail Plea, Denied Again

The Supreme Court's rejection of bail for Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam landed, for their families, as a fresh disappointment layered on top of an old one. Both men have been jailed since early 2020 — Sharjeel Imam since late January of that year, Umar Khalid since September — in connection with cases tied to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and, in Khalid's case, to the north-east Delhi riots that followed. Neither man's trial has yet concluded, or in Khalid's case even meaningfully begun, six years after their arrests.

One family member called it simply absurd to accuse a man already in jail of conspiring to riot, expressing disbelief that the underlying allegation continued to hold up in court despite what they described as its evident contradictions.

Two Paths to the Same Cell

Umar Khalid's political formation, according to family members who spoke about his early life, was shaped young: he was around five years old at the time of the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, an event they say left a lasting impression, and he was in the early stages of his university education when the 2008 Batla House "encounter" — a police raid in which two men were killed — became, for him, a turning point toward activism. Coming from a Muslim family himself, Khalid was already familiar, relatives said, with the mechanics of Islamophobic profiling and media vilification before he became a target of it directly, and had resolved early on to use the opportunities of his education in the service of people facing the same structural discrimination.

That vilification arrived in force in 2016, when Khalid, Kanhaiya Kumar and Anirban Bhattacharya were arrested and charged with sedition over a JNU campus event. Family members recalled a sustained media campaign against Khalid specifically — including broadcasts implying, without evidence, that he had travelled to Pakistan, a claim they noted was logistically impossible given that Khalid did not hold a passport at the time. They also described a specific incident from that period in which investigators allegedly offered Anirban Bhattacharya, who is not Muslim, the chance to become a prosecution witness against Khalid, on the premise that Khalid, as a Muslim, would be dealt with regardless.

Sharjeel Imam's path to the same set of charges ran through a different door: an engineering education at IIT followed by a decision to leave a conventional career and pursue research at JNU into the roots of communal violence in India — work he framed, according to those close to him, around what he called the "majoritarian tyranny" embedded in verdicts like the Supreme Court's ruling on the Babri Masjid title dispute, which most established Muslim community leaders had urged the community to simply accept. Imam was among the few voices who instead organised a protest against the verdict at JNU. When the Shaheen Bagh sit-in against the CAA began, those who worked alongside him described Imam and fellow organiser Asif Iqbal Tanha helping give the protest structure and direction — persuading demonstrators to occupy and block the highway and to press their demands peacefully rather than disperse without a clear strategy.

A Speech, Read in Fragments

The specific legal basis for Imam's continued detention centres on a speech he delivered, one that prosecutors characterised as advocating the secession of India's north-east — a "chicken's neck" remark severing Assam from the rest of the country. Those who have listened to the full recording, roughly 40 minutes long, describe a markedly different substance: repeated calls for a "chakka jaam," a road blockade, as a form of peaceful, constitutionally protected protest, rather than any call to violence or separation. Notably, the Supreme Court's own judgment on the case acknowledges that Imam spoke of "choking" essential services through blockade, not severing territory — a distinction Imam's supporters argue undercuts the broader narrative used to justify his continued custody, even as the speech remains central to the case against him.

Compounding the legal ambiguity, supporters note that five separate FIRs filed against Imam in January 2020 over his speeches have already resulted in bail, with the Allahabad High Court explicitly finding that Imam never called for anyone to take up arms or for any act of violence. The FIR under which he remains in custody, by contrast, concerns an entirely different allegation: that he was among the conspirators behind the Delhi riots of late February 2020. Imam's supporters point out a basic chronological problem with that charge — he had already been in custody since January 28, 2020, weeks before the riots broke out on February 23, making direct participation in an on-the-ground conspiracy difficult to reconcile with the timeline.

The Night of the Arrest

Sharjeel Imam's brother described the circumstances of his arrest in stark terms: a raid conducted jointly by police teams from four states — Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi — that began before dawn prayers, around 3:30 or 4 am, at the home of a friend where Imam had stayed the night. He said Imam was blindfolded, taken to an open field, and ordered to run, in what he described as an apparent staged "encounter" scenario meant to frighten him into answering questions. When Imam refused to run and sat down instead, his brother said, officers allegedly pressed a pistol into his mouth and threatened to shoot him. Imam, his brother said, recited the Islamic declaration of faith, prepared for the possibility of death, before the threat passed.

His family described Imam as someone who does not easily share his own distress, a trait they said mirrored their late father's temperament, and said they had learned only later, during a period when Imam was out on parole, that he had at times been kept in leg chains inside the special cell that held him.

A Chargesheet the Family Calls Designed to Never End

Family members and legal observers who discussed the case were sharply critical of the scale of the prosecution's case against the 18 accused, which they said runs to roughly 3,000 pages and lists close to 900 witnesses — a scale they argued was constructed specifically to ensure the case would consume the defendants' entire working lives regardless of its ultimate merits. They further argued that the chargesheet, despite its length, never substantiates its central claim that the accused sought a violent "regime change," of the kind witnessed in Sri Lanka, Nepal or Bangladesh; nowhere, they said, does the document allege that any protester targeted a government facility, a gap they said undermines the entire premise of applying India's anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, to what was otherwise a constitutionally protected protest movement.

Advocates for the accused also pointed to what they described as a stark asymmetry in the case's medico-legal records, with those injured and killed during the associated riots disproportionately Muslim — raising the question of who, in fact, instigated the violence the chargesheet claims the defendants conspired to provoke.

Waiting, Without Bitterness

Family members were emphatic in resisting the framing of victimhood. "We are not victims," one relative said, arguing that the real victims of injustice are people like Najeeb Ahmed, the JNU student who disappeared in 2016 and has never been found — people who suffered harm they never anticipated or accepted. By contrast, they said, those who went into the anti-CAA protests, including Khalid and Imam, did so knowing the risks, having already seen fellow students injured, some permanently, in earlier demonstrations. A fact-finding delegation that visited the sites of the February 2020 riots found, among other things, between 19 and 21 mosques that had been damaged, burned or, in some cases, destroyed with explosives — evidence, delegation members said, of the violence's lopsided character.

Sharjeel Imam's mother, relatives said, has chosen not to visit him in prison, finding the experience of leaving her son behind bars each time too difficult to bear; the last words she offered him as he left to surrender to police, they recalled, were that she had entrusted him to God's keeping.

Even six years on, those close to both men describe a kind of settled equilibrium rather than despair — Khalid, one relative said, has visibly grown more measured with time, able to situate his imprisonment within a longer historical arc rather than counting days until release, as he once did during a brief, earlier detention in 2016. But freedom, when it eventually comes, will not restore the years already lost. As one relative put it, even should bail finally be granted, the ordinary, unconstrained life Khalid might once have expected to return to no longer exists to come back to.