The Palatable Prisoner: Why Indian Liberals Remember Umar Khalid more
In a recent interview, former CJI Dr. D.Y. Chandrachud was asked by Vir Sanghvi about bail for those long incarcerated under draconian laws — to which the ex-CJI answered in detail about settled laws and the recourse that ought to be, but has not yet been taken. This was followed by another two-word question: Umar Khalid. While one feels slightly relieved that these things are at least being spoken about from such a stage, something eerie still lingers. The question that has made me uneasy for years now is this — why is it only Umar Khalid who is spoken and written about, and not the likes of Sharjeel Imam and Meeran Haider?
I recently came across a social media post from Ramchandra Guha, who posted Dr. Umar Khalid’s PhD thesis and wrote the foreword for it now that it has been published as a book. I have also read Ajaz Ashraf’s pieces on Umar Khalid. These are well-known journalists writing for publications of repute, and what they wrote and amplified was deeply moving — but the absence of similar narratives about other incarcerated lives left a glaring hole. The stories of Shifa ur Rehman Khan, Gulfishan Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, and Meeran Haider remain conspicuous by their absence, at least in these liberal narratives. It is not that their ordeals have gone entirely uncovered — they too have been covered. What is being pointed to here is the depth and volume of that coverage. While Umar Khalid’s story has featured prominently and repeatedly through leading voices — Sanghvi, Guha, Ashraf — others seem to have been covered less frequently, and by lesser-known writers and journalists.
The obvious question, then, is why? Why are writers and influencers of such repute drawn only to one story? To put it more sharply — why is a Sharjeel Imam so unpalatable to these writers when compared with Umar Khalid, particularly when both pursued PhDs from the same institution, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)? What makes a cult figure? What gets someone covered — and what gets someone left out?
Possible Reasons
One possible reason lies in the cultural and social capital that Umar Khalid carries. He studied at Delhi University (DU) and JNU — the two most prominent erstwhile liberal institutions in the country. Interestingly, both Guha and Ashraf are also DU alumni. I am not suggesting conscious bias simply on account of shared campuses, given also the fact that Umar Khalid is considerably junior to them. My more limited submission, viewed through a sociological lens, is about the cultural capital people unconsciously or subconsciously carry. In Bourdieusian terms, they share a similar habitus — which makes Khalid more approachable and removes the need for contextualisation. The conversation flows with ease, like ‘fish in water’. Sharjeel Imam, on the other hand, does not necessarily carry this familiar habitus. He did his graduation from IIT Bombay, worked at software companies, and only later joined JNU for his PhD. He may be culturally less accessible to such establishment figures. His positions on issues sound more counterintuitive and do not sit easily within the hegemonic common sense of the liberal mainstream.
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Consider their academic work — Dr. Khalid’s PhD thesis is on tribal communities in the Chhota Nagpur region — a loathed but still legible subject in today’s India. Sharjeel’s M.Phil. thesis examined the exodus of and attacks on Muslims in Bihar in 1946, focusing on the role of the Indian state apparatus — a subject that is almost entirely unacceptable in today’s India, even to liberals like Guha. He is a scholar of Islamic history and Muslim politics, which sits uncomfortably with the dominant liberal tendency in India to frown upon markers of Muslim identity. A scholar who conducts critical studies of the Indian state on the Muslim question becomes doubly uncomfortable — more so when he is critiquing not only the present regime but the so-called Golden Era of Congress, viewed through a Muslim lens. A Muslim with a left-leaning ideology may be acceptable and palatable; a Muslim who carries his identity unabashedly and does not seek validation from the liberal establishment is quite another matter.
Sometimes Umar Khalid’s story has also been told through the lens of his relationship with a Hindu woman. A Hindu woman narrating the incarceration of a young Muslim scholar-activist is, in many ways, a made-for-Bollywood story — and one that sits comfortably within the liberal narrative. Sharjeel Imam has no such narrator. The pain of his mother, for instance, has remained largely hidden from public view. The deeper question here is about legitimacy: whose pain does the popular narrative legitimise, and whose pain is delegitimised and rendered invisible?
There is also an underlying discomfort around the nature of Khalid’s and Imam’s respective relationships with Muslim identity. Umar Khalid appears, at some level, to moderate his Muslim identity within the secular-left grammar. Sharjeel Imam not only embraces his Muslim identity but uses his scholarly credentials to document the structural bias of the Indian state towards the Muslim community — and crucially, not only under the present dispensation. His critique crosses party lines. It goes to the very foundation of the Indian state and its essential character, regardless of who is ruling it. This — more than any speech — may be what makes establishment liberals most uncomfortable.
There can be merit in the argument that the speech Sharjeel gave is seen as threatening to the territorial integrity of the Indian state, and that this explains the safe distance these liberals maintain from him. But even taking that argument at face value, the first practical manifestation of his call — Shaheen Bagh — produced nothing of the sort. There was no real threat to territorial integrity from a sit-in protest, wherever it occurred. Moreover, the legal position on this is well-settled. The Supreme Court of India in Balwant Singh and Another v. State of Punjab (1995) categorically held that the mere raising of slogans or making of speeches, without any incitement to violence or actual violent consequence, does not constitute sedition. The Court drew a clear line between the expression of a political idea — however provocative or unpopular — and conduct that actually threatens public order or the integrity of the state. Sharjeel Imam’s speech, whatever one may think of its political wisdom, produced no violence, no disorder, and no secessionist act. To invoke sedition and UAPA against a speech that by the Supreme Court’s own standard falls short of the legal threshold is not the application of law — it is its weaponisation. The entire narrative, amplified by a mainstream media operating in bad faith, appears manufactured. Worse, far more inflammatory remarks have been made by leaders across party lines and across the geography of India, with little consequence. Even if one were to take the allegations against Sharjeel at face value — he, like everyone else, deserves a trial. Incarceration without trial is a direct assault on the fundamental rights of these young activists and goes against every established principle of justice.
What this ultimately reveals is not a conspiracy of malice, but a quieter and more troubling failure of the liberal and mainstream imagination — an inability to extend the same solidarity to a Muslim who refuses to translate his politics into a register the liberal establishment finds comfortable. Umar Khalid’s story is told and retold not because his incarceration is more unjust than Sharjeel Imam’s, but because it requires no translation. His campus, his credentials, his romantic narrative, and the moderated terms of his political critique all sit comfortably within the liberal grammar of who deserves sympathy.
Sharjeel Imam’s incarceration is, by any objective legal standard, equally arbitrary and equally deserving of outrage — yet his story demands that liberals sit with discomfort: with a Muslim identity that is not softened by secular credentialing and is not asking for canonization by the establishment liberals, with a historical critique that indicts the Congress-era state as readily as the present one, and with a speech that — however intemperate — never manifested in any act of secession, any violence, or any real threat, as Shaheen Bagh itself demonstrated. If the standard is due process, it must be the same for both men.
The selective amplification of one and the selective silence around the other is not really a comment on Sharjeel Imam’s politics. It is a comment on what Indian liberalism is prepared to defend — and what it would rather not be seen defending. A justice system that incarcerates without trial is an injustice regardless of whose face it wears. And a solidarity movement that only shows up for the more palatable face is not principled solidarity at all. It is a mirror held up to its own limits, its own fears, and its own glass ceilings.
