⇱ Index page

The Internationalist Archive

13th September 2024 marked the fourth anniversary of Indian political prisoner and activist Umar Khalid’s detention under UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act). His prolonged incarceration is emblematic of justice being postponed ceaselessly. 

Chronicling Khalid’s unjust imprisonment, on the day, the documentary film ‘Kaidi No. 626710 Haazir Hai or Prisoner No. 626710 is Present’ directed by Germany-based Indian filmmaker Lalit Vachani, was screened at Jawahar Bhawan in New Delhi. This was followed by a discussion with the two narrators of the film and Umar’s closest allies, Banojyotsana Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The organising committee of this event included Anirban Bhattacharya, who had been accused of “anti-national” activities and being a part of the “tukde tukde gang” along with Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar, who were studying at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) at the time. The phrase “tukde tukde gang” evolved as a reaction to calls for Kashmir's right to self-determination and freedom, terming those in favour as desiring to tear India apart. 

Vachani’s documentary outlines the timeline of political events that led to Khalid’s arrest, creating a link between him and other, overwhelmingly Muslim, jailed student activists such as Sharjeel Imam, Safoora Zargar, Gulfisha Fatima, Tahir Hussain, Ishrat Jahan, and others. In one fell swoop, these activists had been booked under the draconian colonial era UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) Laws, alleging them to be the “masterminds” behind the Delhi Pogrom or Riots of 2020. It paints a humane and affectionate portrait of Khalid, as opposed to his popular portrayal in the media. The narrative is focused through two sets of interviews with Banojyotsana Lahiri (Khalid’s partner) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (friend of Khalid’s) who talk about him as a voracious student and kind friend, apart from elucidating his seemingly orchestrated persecution and arrest. 

The media frenzy around Khalid began with a peaceful reading at JNU about the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament and its convict Afzal Guru’s death penalty. Zee News circulated videos of the sit-in where people who were not students of JNU were chanting “anti-national” slogans. This supposedly proved the guilt of the student activists such as Khalid, who was arrested alongside Kumar. With this event, there had been an active target formed on Khalid and others’ backs, eventually leading up to the 2020 arrest. 

What is prominent in the film is the focus on the media collusion and mischaracterisation of Khalid and other activists. Through Vachani’s lens, we are witness to Indian media’s lack of journalistic ethics as today it functions largely as a mouthpiece for the regime. Importantly, the terms “anti-national” and “tukde tukde gang” were coined by the media and they became a convenient shorthand in order to create a narrative of a singular mainstream Hindu nationalism intolerant of dissent. 

In this interview for The Internationalist, writer Sukanya Deb speaks to Vachani about the nature of media collusion ahead of and after Khalid’s arrest, and how political action has become a challenge in recent years.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sukanya Deb: What prompted you to make the documentary film ‘Prisoner No. 626710 is Present (Kaidi No. 626710 Haazir Hai)? Could you talk about the process of making the film? 

Lalit Vachani: I’ve made two films on the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) before––The Boy in the Branch in 1993, and the second one, The Men in the Tree, is a revisit where I go back to film the same people in 2002. So my initial idea was to make a third film on the RSS. To cut a long story short, I did go back to my characters in 2016, but that film was not going anywhere. 

I had been continually filming different stories, and somewhere down the line I realised that what I was actually doing was filming shorter films on the impact of Hindu nationalism on Indian society, broadly. Then in 2019, I was filming the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests, and I was at Jamia Millia Islamia University around the time when the Shaheen Bagh protests had just begun. Only days before, the Delhi police had inflicted brutal violence on the students who had been protesting against the CAA act. While I was originally on a personal visit to the university, I also went back there to start filming as my connection with the University ran deeper, since I had taught at Jamia in the 1990s. So this kind of attack on the university felt personal, and it was a horrific event. 

As I was filming there, I met a lot of activists and people who later got arrested. Ironically, the one person I was not able to meet was Umar Khalid, because he was travelling then. Later in 2023, when I looked through the 2019 material where I had captured the protesting students getting arrested, I decided to do another shoot and revisit these spaces. It is in this context that I go back to meet Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who’s one of the main characters in the film and who had assisted me with my earlier RSS film work. Through Shuddha, I met Bunu [Banojyotsana Lahiri], who’s become a friend now. When I began interviewing them, I knew that my film was going to be on the Delhi Riots and anti-CAA protests. It was only when I started looking at the speeches made by Umar Khalid and connected the dots regarding his framing by the Hindu nationalist media, that this film started coming together. 

As a result, I decided to make a series of films on Hindu nationalism [in India], and this would be the first film in that effort. So, we decided to focus on Umar Khalid and the way he’s been framed by the mainstream media from 2016 onwards. 

SD: Could you also talk about the distribution of footage shot and that which you compiled from other sources? For example, there is a pre-recorded video by Umar Khalid where he predicts his arrest, and which is excerpted through the film. How do these different sources come together for you? 

LV: A lot of my footage consists of the anti-CAA protests and speeches made at Jamia Millia Islamia and Shaheen Bagh. What Umar was saying during the anti-CAA protests has a great parallel to the material I shot. For example, the speakers [student activists] that I film were going up on stage and talking about following the principles of the Constitution. According to them, no matter what happens, we have to follow the Gandhian principles of peace and non-violence. People are going to try to come and disrupt, and provoke you to take a militant stand, but you have to be very careful. I saw how speeches after speeches were talking about non-violence and this is mirrored in Umar’s speech as well.

People like Sharjeel Imam, Gulfisha Fatima — though I didn’t get a chance to speak to them — only sang songs of protest, and I filmed all of it. It was only later when I realised that they had been arrested by the police that I became, in a sense, an eyewitness.  

I think I was in Delhi during the time that JNU students were being attacked [for organising a reading session in response to Afzal Guru’s sentencing, by the ABVP — the student wing of the BJP], but there’s so much you forget. It’s only when you put the material on the timeline, the travesty of justice, and the way this young man’s rights have been taken away from him, since 2016, systematically, that this film starts taking place. 

Banojyotsana Lahiri from Lalit Vachani's Prisoner No. 626710 is Present. Photo courtesy: Lalit Vachani.

SD: In your film, there’s a point where Umar Khalid realises the role the media is playing to propagate an ‘anti-national’ image of him. Could you talk about the collusion between the media and the current government to produce certain events?

LV: There’s an interesting background that I’d like to bring up here. In my second RSS film, I have these ex-RSS volunteers who talk about the ‘false flag operation’ where combatants stage an event and falsely attribute it to the enemy, providing a pretext for launching an attack.

These techniques and deployments have been in use during the World Wars and are currently being used by the Israeli army on Gaza. There are ex-RSS volunteers who came out now and claim that they were forced or asked to do things, like creating an event or spreading rumours that the Muslims were going to attack. 

So these tactics actually create a kind of psychosis amongst the Hindu community where they, under the guise of self-defence, go out and spread hate and violence. And through this, it's suddenly very clear why the people who are talking about peace and non-violence are being framed for things that they have clearly not been involved in. However, the powers that are orchestrating the violence, who have been caught on camera too, are getting away because they are in a position of power. So this is not an arsenal that is being deployed behind the scenes or in a small fashion to create communal unrest; this is happening on a large scale. 

Getting back to the point about the collusion between the media and the state, I have recollections as a student of Delhi University (DU) in the 1980s, where you had the right to dissent. There were members from various political parties who wouldn’t wish you well or would try to rough you up. I wouldn’t say it was safe, but it certainly was not organised. You wouldn’t have the media coming after you or vilifying you. You didn’t have the state in this coherent, concerted form, coming in to smash your protest. That was a space that always existed, that you could protest. But now what we are seeing from 2016, and I think this was very conscious, I think that the biggest thorn in the side of the RSS has been institutions like JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University], a “den of the leftists” where free speech happens. JNU was always an institution that would’ve been attacked. 

What is interesting about 2016 is there were back to back events at Hyderabad Central University (HCU) after the death of Rohith Vemula [a Dalit PhD scholar at HCU] and then JNU, but the attacks on the students largely centred in JNU. Banojyotsana and Shuddha both pick it up in the film. It’s this point where the media actively starts colluding with the state or political forces to frame JNU students in a particular kind of way. This is when fabricated news for the first time starts becoming the new normal. And I am shocked now when we look back that this was all happening, and there were not enough protests or enough national media channels at the time that had not been compromised. 

From Lalit Vachani's Prisoner No. 626710 is Present.Photo courtesy: Lalit Vachani.

SD: It’s interesting that you say that because by the time it was 2019 or 2020 when the Delhi pogrom took place, we all watched, in shock, the videos of Muslim houses and shops being burned and destroyed. The riots, in particular, played out over Twitter, adding to a certain helplessness as well. Between the dispersion of media in mainstream news channels who had become a mouthpiece for the BJP, and social media channels which allowed a certain mode of viewing on-ground conflict, what was this active mode of witnessing?

LV: My recollection of that time had so many different aspects in relation to the media spectacle we were witnessing. In the documentary, Shuddha talks about how we saw the riots live on social media channels, because people were going into the scene and recording the violence. Then there were people going in and recording themselves, bragging and boasting about the violence they were going to cause. In the film, we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of stuff like this so far.

These young [Hindu] men spewing abuse at Muslims and what they’re going to do to them, but also just strutting around in this macho way. And there were a lot of Muslim journalists from The Caravan or The Wire being threatened and attacked even as they reported from the ground. And of course, a lot of footage we used in this film and will be used in the Dehi Riots project is actually footage that was taken by the Hindu fundamentalists/ nationalists themselves, who were so proud of this material they put out there. They are so confident that the power regime is with them that they get away with it. It is almost like, let me record this and you can appreciate me for my valour as part of this Hindu nationalist cause, and for doing your bidding. 

Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Lalit Vachani's Prisoner No. 626710 is Present. Photo courtesy: Lalit Vachani.

SD: With the rise of relentless intolerance and fascism, could you talk about the symbol that Umar Khalid has become in terms of the political landscape? What is the kind of solidarity and resistance that is required at the current moment?

LV: This is a very important question. The first thing I’d like to say is that when I made this film, I made it as a very simple, modestly crafted film. If you break it down to its bare bones, it has two interviews with really close friends of Umar’s––one being his soulmate, and one being a dear friend. And it’s structured around these two intimate interviews along with Umar Khalid’s speeches and how the Hindu nationalist media represents him. Since its release, I have to say that I’ve been flabbergasted by the response. The film has been picked up by human rights and civil society activist groups who’ve hosted screenings. We had close to 65 screenings in India over 3 days. There was an international screening, where people from India and other parts of the world tuned in. I’m getting requests for screening links all the time.

Umar Khalid is seen as a symbol of belonging and resistance, someone who exemplifies the unjustness of the regime. By extension, our film crew was very clear from the beginning that the film is also about freeing all political prisoners by tying the case of Umar Khalid with other political prisoners who have been wrongly incarcerated. 

There are people who have believed the mainstream narrative around him being a separatist and part of terrorist groups and so on. To debunk that becomes important. 

People from organising committees in Karnataka, for example, have written to me about people on the ground getting motivated. The film is just a catalyst, but it’s energising people who feel this is a very important conversation, about freeing political prisoners. But how do these conversations reach the judiciary? Four of the incarcerated, their hearing is coming up on 7th October [now moved to 25 November 2024]. How does it get to that bench, what is the conduit––what is the way we can create pressure, and how can those people hear these conversations? Bail hearings are not happening, how can we talk about justice? It comes back to the conversation about mass media effects and the power of social documentary to change. It remains to be seen whether the sphere that we’re in can make a difference to the public sphere of the regime. 

The Internationalist Archive