Darkness at Noon: A Former Student Leader Reflects On Hope, Despair, and Survival From Behind Prison Walls

- Umar Khalid's five-year journey from JNU dissent to Tihar's confines.

In the confines of Tihar Jail in New Delhi, where time moves differently and hope becomes both salvation and torment, Umar Khalid finds unexpected companionship in the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The 19th-century Russian author’s reflections on imprisonment in “The House of the Dead” resonate across centuries and continents, speaking to a reality that has changed little despite the world’s transformation.
“We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead,” Khalid quotes a fellow inmate from Dostoevsky’s work, words that capture the liminal existence of those caught between freedom and captivity, between hope and despair.
As he approaches the fifth anniversary of his incarceration at Tihar Jail, the former Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader and Ph.D scholar in history has become an unlikely chronicler of prison life, offering rare insights into the psychological landscape of prolonged detention without trial.
Khalid’s journey to Tihar began not in 2020, but years earlier on the politically charged campus of JNU. In February 2016, he was among the students who organized an event commemorating the death anniversary of Afzal Guru, the convict in the 2001 Parliament attack case. The protest against Guru’s execution sparked what became known as the JNU sedition row, catapulting Khalid into national headlines alongside fellow student leader Kanhaiya Kumar.
The February 9, 2016 protest on the JNU campus was against the capital punishment meted out to both Afzal Guru and Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhat. According to the police chargesheet, Khalid and fellow student Anirban Bhattacharya were accused of raising anti-India slogans and planning the event through social media connections with Kashmiri students.
The sedition charges from the 2016 JNU incident would follow Khalid for years, but it was a different set of allegations that would ultimately land him in prolonged detention. In September 2020, authorities arrested Khalid under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for alleged involvement in the 2020 Delhi Riots, with accusations that he incited communal violence through speeches in February 2020. The arrest came after Khalid had been targeted for leading peaceful protests opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The Graveyard of the Living
From his cell in Tihar, Khalid describes the surreal experience of returning to jail after a brief seven-day interim bail. He had invoked a Biblical story about jail being “the graveyard of the living” – a metaphor that would later find echo in Dostoevsky’s title “The House of the Dead.”
Despite being imprisoned since September 2020, Khalid has been consistently denied bail and his court trial is yet to begin.
“There is indeed something about captivity that makes one feel like a state of somewhere between life and death,” Khalid writes in his recent op-ed for The Quint, revealing the psychological toll of indefinite detention.
What strikes Khalid most about his five-year incarceration is not the confinement itself, but his own capacity for adaptation. “At times I am amazed how I have survived so long in the same confined space, and not been restless through most of this period,” he reflects. The key, he suggests, lies in not thinking about time in large chunks but focusing on immediate dates – bail hearings that occur every few months, creating fragments of hope to cling to.
The Dangerous Business of Hope
Drawing from Dostoevsky’s observations about prisoner psychology, Khalid explores the complex relationship between hope and survival in captivity. The Russian author wrote about how prisoners “instinctively unable to accept his lot as something positive, final, as part of real life” and how “every convict feels that he is, so to speak, not at home but on a visit.”
But Khalid admits to a more guarded relationship with hope. “Probably I am no longer the optimist that I used to be earlier,” he writes, describing his approach as based on “a realistic assessment of the present political situation.” More tellingly, he reveals: “Nurturing hope in jail is also a risky business. The higher you hope, the higher is the height from which you come crashing down.”
This wariness of hope sets Khalid apart from many of his fellow prisoners, who he describes as “insanely hopeful, even those in the most hopeless situations.” To illustrate this point, he shares the remarkable story of a fellow inmate who has been imprisoned for 29 years under a life sentence that explicitly stated he would remain in prison until his natural death without parole.
A Story of Persistence
The unnamed prisoner, now in his 50s after entering jail in his 20s during the early 1990s, had seemingly resigned himself to a life of routine – morning work assignments, evening badminton, quiet solitude. Yet even he had not abandoned hope entirely. Through careful legal research, he discovered that while his presidential pardon denied him parole, it said nothing about furlough – temporary releases for good conduct.
After years of legal battles that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the prisoner won a 21-day furlough – his first taste of freedom in 28 years. When he returned, he told Khalid that the three weeks outside felt like 21 minutes, describing a world where most relatives he once knew had died and new family members remained strangers.
Crucially, he didn’t attempt to escape during his furlough, sustained by the hope that this legal victory might lead to further relief. As he told Khalid, referencing the recent Supreme Court decision to release those involved in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination: “They were all involved in killing the PM, maine PM ko to nahi maara tha na [I didn’t kill the PM, did I]?”
The Weight of Time
For Khalid, five years represents a different kind of temporal measurement – “time enough for people to complete their Ph.Ds and look for jobs, time enough to fall in love, marry and have a baby, time enough for one’s kids to grow beyond recognition.” It’s also time enough, he notes with bitter precision, “for the world to normalize the genocide in Gaza, time enough for our parents to grow old and feeble.”
Despite being imprisoned since September 2020, Khalid has been consistently denied bail and his court trial is yet to begin. He faces charges including sedition, murder, attempt to murder, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, and rioting.
What emerges from Khalid’s writing is not just the account of a political prisoner, but the observations of a trained historian grappling with the continuities of human experience across time and geography. His ability to find relevance in Dostoevsky’s 19th-century Russian prison experience speaks to both his scholarly training and the universal aspects of captivity.
Khalid notes that Dostoevsky wrote about why prisoners don’t escape even when opportunities arise – they value the time they’ve already invested in their sentence and believe in eventual legal resolution. “The only ones who try running are those who were in the beginning of their sentence,” Khalid observes. “Anyone who gives that considerable time to jail won’t run away even if the gates are opened for them.”
The Question Remains
As Khalid approaches his fifth anniversary in Tihar, his question hangs in the air: “Is it time enough for our release?” The question carries the weight of indefinite detention, of trials that haven’t begun, of hope that he admits to fearing even as it sustains him.
His reflections offer a rare window into the psychology of prolonged imprisonment without trial, revealing how individuals adapt to circumstances that exist in the space between life and death, between hope and despair. In finding kinship with Dostoevsky’s prisoners from another century, Khalid illuminates how little has changed in the fundamental experience of captivity – and how much the human spirit can endure while waiting for justice.
Through his words from Tihar, Khalid transforms his personal ordeal into a broader meditation on resilience, hope, and the price of dissent in contemporary India. Whether his five years will prove “time enough for release” remains an open question, but his voice from behind prison walls continues to challenge us to consider what justice means when time itself becomes both punishment and possibility.