On April 11, 2020, Umar Khalid [an Indian student activist leader] sent me a message on Twitter. He shared a poster that said over 15,000 primary healthcare centers in India were operating with just one doctor, out of approximately 30,000 such centers that provide basic care in rural areas. He was organizing digitally to demand that the Modi administration “prioritize healthcare and not hate.”

His message came with a compliment. “You are doing amazing work.” I never responded. Those were the manic, early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. India was deep in a nationwide lockdown, and I was reporting on the humanitarian crisis, marked by a massive migrant worker exodus and alarming science denialism.

We forget today that the lockdown was imposed on March 24, when India had around 500 Covid-19 cases. The Modi government took advantage of the pandemic to impose emergency measures and silence the opposition, notably by breaking up the major protest movement in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood of Delhi. The peaceful sit-in led primarily by Muslim women in Delhi opposed the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens.

Accused of terrorism

A few months later, on September 13, 2020, Umar was arrested for inciting communal violence through speeches in February 2020. During the pandemic, other equal rights activists – Sharjeel Imam, Athar Khan, Abdul Khalid Saifi, Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa Ur Rehman, Mohd Saleem Khan, and Shadab Ahmed – were also rounded up, accused of terrorism, imprisoned and the key was tossed out.

And then suddenly, if you can call it sudden, Umar and his friends had been in prison for five years. In that time, the pandemic ended, a new government was elected, four different chief justices have come and gone, and I published a book and moved cities multiple times.

From time to time, I stare at that DM from Umar on Twitter, wondering what I would say to this man whose life has been at a standstill. What can one say about these decent, brilliant people having to be in prison with half-penny bag-snatchers and dedicated, professional criminals? No one should be subject to a trial like this. If this were a medical experiment, instead of a political one, what’s being done to Umar and other political prisoners would be termed vivisection.

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