(We are able to give a platform to Umar Khalid and other political prisoners because of our editorial independence. This comes with risks and threats. Support our journalism by becoming a member.)
On a cold starry night, I look out at the sky from my prison cell. I spot the brightest star and imagine it’s you smiling at me from up there. Asking me to “stay strong”. Whenever I feel tired, weak or lonely, I derive strength from the words you left us with.
I wish we could talk.
We never got a chance to talk after you in life. But here in solitude, looking at the brightest star in the night sky, it feels like I am having that conversation from my cold, damp prison cell.
It has been a decade, Rohith.
'Yours Was an Institutional Murder....But You Had an Afterlife, Rohith'
It was a similar winter evening when we were campaigning at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), expressing our outrage about the way you and your friends were being hounded, harassed and socially boycotted by the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) administration. As we moved from one hostel to another in the middle of the campaign, the news arrived. The news of you taking the noose in your ultimate act of defiance.
The next day and for many days after that I was on the streets along with thousands of students expressing our collective anguish.
We have always maintained that you didn’t die by suicide. Yours was an institutional murder. It was a mix of many emotions at that time. Grief, shock, anger and a sense of disbelief as we witnessed the apathy and cynicism of a regime so drunk in power.
It has been a decade since. The irony is that while I have been behind bars for more than half of those years, no one responsible for your death has yet been held accountable.
You had a life, which you yourself called a product of a fatal accident. But you also had an afterlife Rohith. Not like the Brahmin’s claims of being twice born. But an afterlife that lives on in the memory and defiance of those who chose the path of truth. You live on thereby in the echoes of justice.
You wrote:
The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In every field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.Rohith Vemula
I have not read words more poignant, more scathing, more haunting.
'I Write to You as a UAPA Undertrial'
I had no idea that just a month after your murder, I would be at the receiving end of my near-fatal accident of birth. That I would be at the receiving end of a malicious media trial that would brand me as an “anti-national” just like they branded you. That they would send me along with others to jail under sedition. That two hooligans with a pistol would find their way to me baying for blood. I was ten years younger then and I said, borrowing from Shah Rukh Khan, that “My name is Umar Khalid, but I am not a terrorist”.
But ten years since, while I am writing to you from this prison cell, I still remain an undertrial under the most draconian anti-terror law Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). I wonder what was this “unlawful act” or “terror act” - that I urged people to fight against hatred with love? Or that I said we should face their lathis (sticks) with the Constitution held in our hands? Or that I took part in the historic and peaceful civil disobedience movement of Shaheen Bagh against the divisive and anti-Muslim amendments being made to our citizenship laws? Or was it my most immediate identity, my nearest possibility i.e. my name?
I wish we could speak, Rohith. I wish late into the night we could debate and decipher what went wrong in the life of this Republic that we reached where we are today. How in this so called “Amrit Kaal”, justice for Dalits and Muslims in India remains elusive. While other equal citizenship activists and I languish behind bars without trial for a crime I never committed, those who were really responsible for the Delhi riots — the real rioters — remain not only unpunished, but have been elevated to positions of power.
And it is not only about me. What message does it send out when ministers garland those convicted of lynching a muslim man? Or when the rapists of Bilkis Bano are released early and given a hero’s welcome? Where should the family of Faizan, who was killed at 23, beaten by the police on the streets, forced to recite the national anthem, go to seek justice? Where should Fatima Nafees go to find her missing son Najeeb? What of the families of Dalit women who see their upper caste rapists walk free? Who should Khalid Saifi’s daughter turn to if she wishes to appeal for the return of her truncated childhood? In this decade, we have truly become a post-truth society. And facts today are what power wants them to be.
'Our Homeland is Being Hijacked by Those Who Opposed Ambedkar and Killed Gandhi'
Babasaheb Ambedkar had famously said that he had no homeland. The Citizenship Amendment Act yet again posed the same question to me and my likes. Do we have a homeland? It attempted to take away the assurances that the Constitution had guaranteed. It was being taken away by the same forces who wanted Manu’s smriti and not Ambedkar’s Constitution, the same forces who were identified by Ambedkar as the greatest threat to democracy, the same forces whose forerunners killed Gandhi. I wish you and I could claim this homeland as one that is as much as ours as it is anyone else’s. I wish in the name of NRC, CAA, SIR and such other acronyms we were not constantly being made to feel alien in our own land.
I wish you were alive Rohith. We had a lot to share, a lot to learn from each other. I wish you were waiting on the other side of these bars to speak of our hopes and frustrations, our romances, about Marx, about Ambedkar, about our resolves and our fears, our differences and our agreements, our nightmares and our shared dreams.
By pushing you to death and by putting me in prison they ensured that this conversation could never materialise. Because this is what this regime fears — young thinking people who agree and disagree, who think, who debate, who dissent. There is only one kind of conversation it allows and rewards i.e. who can give the most hateful hate speech possible. All other conversations – about caste & communalism, about neoliberalism and market fundamentalism have been declared ‘anti-national’.
They came after you for your immediate identity. And yet, after you left they tried every means to snatch even that identity from you. How do we reclaim our identities, how do we assert the same and alongside practice a politics of transformation that transcends the same, that strengthens the struggles of the gig workers and their precarity, the struggles of the agricultural worker deep in debt or the struggles of the people of Palestine.
Rohith, you should know that while those responsible for your death are still at large, while the newsrooms still spew venom, while the rulers still flaunt their money and muscle, but still there are millions who remain animated by your vision of India. That is your afterlife. Your idea of annihilation of caste and a truly democratic India will continue to haunt the powers that be.
They may kill us, they may imprison our bodies, but they can’t stop the possibility of the spring that lurks at the corner of the very darkest winter, waiting to sprout. Because as Bhagat Singh said this fight neither began with us, nor will end our lives.
You will always be alive Rohith, from the shadows to the stars.
Jai Bhim!
Your brother, Umar
(The article was carried first in the book "Umar Khalid and his world: An anthology" by the Three Essays Collective)