Frontline ·
A republic’s travesty of justice
Umar Khalid’s six years in Tihar expose how prolonged pretrial detention under UAPA has become a means of punishing dissent, with Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis bearing a disproportionate burden.
On September 13, 2026, Umar Khalid completed six years in Tihar Jail. Not one prosecution witness has been examined.
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a case like Umar’s. This is the silence of a system that has learned to punish without verdict, to sentence without trial, and most importantly, to convert the process itself into the penalty. We should not mistake it for the silence of forgetting, as Umar’s name still circulates in seminars, in solidarity statements, and in the anxious conversations of students who understand what his incarceration means for them. Six years. More than two thousand one hundred and ninety days. Not a single witness has been called to testify. And still, no bail.
Miscarriages of justice in the ordinary sense imply error, accident, or the failure of an otherwise functioning mechanism. But what we confront in Umar’s case, and in the broader architecture of which he is the most visible symbol, is something more deliberate. We see the transformation of pretrial detention from an exceptional measure into the standard operating procedure of a government that knows it does not need convictions to put away its dissenters.
