The Case of Umar Khalid Underscores Judicial Crisis

On September 13, there were five years of imprisonment without sponsorship or trial for Indian activist Omar Khaled, who was detained on terrorist terrorist charges. On September 2, the Supreme Court in Delhi rejected his call again, alongside others. Khaled appealed the decision and appealed to the Indian Supreme Court, which voted on Thursday to postpone a hearing on this issue.

Khaled, 38, was an active as a student, during a period of democratic decline in India. This period – which came in the bharatiya janata party, which was Prime Minister Narindra Modi (BJP) – was characterized by an increase in attacks on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, moderate political financing, weakening electoral supervision, legal targeting of critics and opponents, and high hate crimes against minorities.

Khaled has become a strong symbol of the opposition, especially for Indian Muslims. He was arrested in what was widely seen as an attempt to silence Muslim activists protesting the 2019 citizenship amending law (CAA), which created a path to Indian nationality of some persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries but excluded Muslims. The detention of Khaled Muttar – and other Muslim activists who opposed the controversial law – is going through a message that in India today, the Islamic opposition is punished indefinitely.

For the Islamic community in India, Moody’s era was a dark chapter. In recent years, Muslims have faced reduced by Hindus vigilant on suspicion of transferring livestock to slaughter, and the authorities have ignored hostile hate gatherings, and the calls of social and economic provinces of Muslims and commercial works owned by Muslims have become more common.

Meanwhile, the Indian judiciary has significantly failed to verify the authoritarian height-which puts a ruling on CAA’s 2019 constitutionality, supported the cancellation of the embodiment of the Muslim majority Kashmir, and gave the lands of the new temple.

However, many people have turned into the courts of India for basic relief. The refusal of the guarantee for Khaled and other Muslim activists, despite a clear legal precedent and their detention before the trial exceeds a setback for the detainees: it indicates that the frightening judiciary is unwilling to stand on its basic duty.

in the wake of From the clip Among the CAA, and amid a threat letter from the Indian Minister of Interior Amit Shah and discussing the citizenship record worldwide, Muslims were afraid of what might happen to them if they could not provide papers to prove that they are citizens. With the growth of the CAA control, Hindus and Muslims met to protest in multiple cities, leaving the Moody government.

When Khaled was arrested on September 13, 2020, he was accused of planning mass violence in New Delhi, coinciding with US President Donald Trump’s visit in February. Violence in low -income neighborhoods erupted in northeastern Delhi on February 23, after the anti -CAA protesters organized a sit -in under the metro station the day before and prevented a road. The turmoil has escalated to three days of riots-the worst episode of religious violence in the capital since the anti-Sikhs massacres that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Andra Gandhi in 1984.

Of the 53 people were killed during Delhi riots in 2020, it was about three quarters of Muslims.

However, the police said that the CAA control movement was a coverage of planning for riots, accusing its leaders of fear and trying to escalate the protests to a Chakkka Jam, or a form of a road barrier protest. The authorities argue that the movement’s goal is to create a chaos that would lead to collective violence.

Regarding this alleged conspiracy, the police have offered terrorism, apple and murder against 18 people, 16 of whom are Muslims. Although the Delhi Upper Court rejected the sponsorship of Khaled for the second time on September 2, some of the accused had received a suspended stop for three and a half years – where they collected their cases three different seats without a ruling.

Khaled is portrayed as the mastermind of the plot. He reached the national interest for the first time in 2016 as a graduate student at the University of Jawaher Nahu (JNU) during a controversy about an event held to celebrate the execution of Guru’s healing, a man from the Kashmiri convicted of the Indian parliament attack in 2001 – a situation that many Indians consider deeply frightening.

The government campaign at the JNU event sparked widespread protests and led to periods against three students: Kanhaiya Kumar, who later joined the Communist Party in India and then the Indian National Congress Party; Anirban Bhattacharlya, now researcher; And Khaled, who participated in the establishment of a United Campaign against hatred. In 2022, the Indian Supreme Court has effectively stopped all cases of continuous sedition by setting the law of sedition in the colonial era.

By that time, Khaled was held in prison for terrorism for nearly two years. In India, people who face a prison trial often sitting as cases move at an ice pace across the courts. The immersed judicial system displays the deep indifference to these detainees, with sometimes spaced listening sessions, weeks or months, and postponing them frequently.

However, the procedures in the Khaled case go beyond this regular problem – it appears to be a deliberate attempt to turn the legal process into the punishment.

While the authorities do not provide any evidence linking those accused of riots or weapons, the case is largely dependent on WhatsApp messages from protest groups and a testimony from protesting witnesses-who gave almost identical statements registered after the arrest of activists. According to a report from Article 14One of the witnesses gave inconsistent accounts in four data on January 8, 2020, where they said that Khaled and others discussed the riots during Trump’s visit. the fiveAn Indian digital news port said that in the history of the alleged meeting, there was no general information about Trump’s planned visit.

During more than two months of anti-CAA protests in 2020, the police produced only one letter as a guide against Khaled-manufacture in Amraati, more than 1000 km (620 miles) from Delhi, a week before the riots. In this, Khaled urged people to go to the streets while Trump’s visit to India in protest against CAA, but he did not call for violence, instead, calling the Matma Gandhi’s methods of civil disobedience.

When the police raised the case on March 6, 2020, they only had a clip of the speech by the Bharatia Jatata Party official. According to the defense of Khaled, the authorities did not retrieve the raw shots after four months.

Weak police case It became clear in June 2021, when the Supreme Court in Delhi heard wide arguments for the first time and gave the guarantee to three of Khaled. Nobody found “anything at all” in the accusation paper to justify the charges of terrorism, and the police criticizing it “exaggeration” and “extended inferences”, which leads to the lack of clarity in the line between protest and terrorism.

The criticism of the Supreme Court was shaken, the police rushed to the Supreme Court to obtain the residency of the guarantee order; The Supreme Court granted the residence a few days later and decided that the warranty order would not be treated as a precedent. The message to the courts was clear: the state was determined to protect itself from additional embarrassment. In 2022, despite the same facts that were presented about the alleged conspiracy, the Supreme Court seat included one of the same judges who granted the bail to others one year before the guarantee to Khaled.

In the ranking of September 2 this year, a different seat found that Khaled’s speech was “inflammation”. This time, the Supreme Court said that the delay in procedures was not always the reasons for granting the guarantee and significantly getting rid of that there was no delay even after five years without trial. Khaled’s comparisons rejected the participants who were previously granted on bail.

Khaled is not the only one who suffers from prison. Golvisa Fatima, a 32 -year -old Muslim woman from a low -income background, was rejected on bail after five and a half years in detaining the trial in the same case. Sharajel Imam, PhD at JNU, the student was arrested a month before the riots that take place in 2020 on charges of sedition and “enhance enmity between different groups”, spent nearly six years in prison despite the fact that his words – however, is controversial – within the limits of constitutionally protected speech.

Delhi’s Supreme Court Order on September 2 was followed by sessions that started in December 2024. For some of Khaled the joint, this third position of the Supreme Court was to hear the guarantee appeals in a little more than three years, and it is a clear disregard for the Supreme Court course that confirms the disposal of the sponsorship requests in a timely manner. On September 12, the Supreme Court repeated that “personal freedom requests cannot be preserved for years,” with his recommendation that such calls be determined within two months.

However, the Khaled case is still obligatory, pending a hearing at the Supreme Court on September 19. What India is witnessing is not just a democratic decline – but a cultural shift in which the general scene of suffering has become normalized.