More than 200 educationists, filmmakers and authors, including Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie and Mira Nair, issued a joint statement on Wednesday demanding the Centre free former JNU student leader Umar Khalid and open itself to dissent.

Among signatories are journalist P. Sainath, actor Ratna Pathak Shah, filmmaker Nakul Sawhney, author Arundhati Roy, and renowned scholars Judith Butler, Romila Thapar and Sheldon Pollock.

Khalid has been arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in what has been a much-criticised attempt by the Delhi Police to implicate him in its theory that the riots were the result of conspiracy hatched by anti-CAA protesters.

The statement comes on the same day when Khalid was sent to judicial custody for nearly a month.

Full Statement

As an international community of scholars, teachers, students, artists and film-makers, we have watched with alarm the events unfolding in India. We stand in solidarity and outrage, with the brave young scholar and activist Umar Khalid, arrested in New Delhi on Sept 14, 2020, under fabricated charges of engineering the Delhi riots in February 2020. He is charged with sedition, conspiracy to murder, and under sections of India’s stringent anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). This process of criminalizing all dissent has been underway for a few years and even under a COVID 19 pandemic, relentless political arrests under fabricated charges are punishing the innocent long before they are brought to trial.

What was Umar Khalid’s crime? That he used the passion of his commitment to his country, marshalled his education and his voice to join the movement for equal citizenship, against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA); this law introduced religion as a criterion for citizenship, and has no place in a secular nation. Combined with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), it threatened the citizenship rights of millions of India’s poorest, and especially targeted Muslims. After the passage of the CAA on December 11, 2020, the movement against the CAA-NRC, in a matter of weeks, became the largest most peaceful democratic rights movement in independent India. It followed proudly in the footsteps of Mahatma Gandhi and embodied the spirit of the Indian Constitution drafted under the leadership of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Much like Black Lives Matter, the movement against CAA-NRC with full participation of all democratic rights actors, was led by those most affected – Muslims and especially Muslim women; students across universities, regions, classes and religions played a leading role.

Umar Khalid became a powerful young voice of truth in this movement, speaking at close to 100 meetings across India, in small towns and big cities, upholding the values of India’s constitution; articulating the dreams of all young Indians – of freedom from hunger, deprivation, discrimination and fear. He staked his claim to the full measure of citizenship, he spoke for all marginal peoples, and above all Umar spoke for peace.

“We will not respond to violence with violence. We will not respond to hate with hate. If they spread hate, we will respond to it by spreading love. If they beat us with lathis, we will hold aloft the Tricolour. If they fire bullets, then we will hold the Constitution and raise our hands. If they jail us, we will go to jail happily singing, ‘Saarey Jahaan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara’. But we will not let you destroy our country…”

Umar Khalid, Amravati (Maharashtra), February 17, 2020

In 2018 Umar Khalid had defended what his examiners at India’s prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, called a brilliant doctoral dissertation, on India’s most deprived people – the Adivasis of Jharkhand. But while Umar chose to arm himself with a PhD, those who wanted to silence him, used weapons of violence, and in the same year, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by a gunman, while attending a public event. He has been projected as a jihadi, and a figure of hate by sections of a compromised Indian media, not only because he speaks persuasively against government policies that he believes are unjust, but also because he is Muslim.

Today Umar Khalid joins a long list of those targeted, implicated and unjustly incarcerated under UAPA, only because they were active in the equal citizenship movement, against the CAA-NRC. To send its chilling message to all critics, the State has chosen India’s best and brightest; the young, the fearless, the dreamers of a better country, where inequality is not a bitter pill for some to swallow, but a vile aberration to be fought against at all times.

Read the names: Ishrat Jahan, Gulfisha Fatima, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Safoora Zargar, Meeran Haider, Asif Iqbal Tanha, Athar Khan, Umar Khalid, Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and 10 others. The two non-Muslims, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, are fiery young feminists, who fought for the rights of women students in India’s male-dominated campuses; against a masculinist state that cannot abide their fearlessness. Safoora Zargar arrested when 3 months pregnant, heartlessly kept for 2 months in a crowded prison during the COVID 19 pandemic, is the only one who got bail on ‘humanitarian grounds’ and only because of enormous public outcry. Currently, 19 of the 21 people falsely accused under terror laws, are Muslim. If we allow their identity to become their crime, India shall stand shamed in the global community of secular nations.

These people are not terrorists, and the police investigation into the Delhi riots is not an investigation. It is a pre-meditated witch-hunt. Although between December 2019 and February 2020, leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gave hate speeches inciting their supporters to ‘shoot the traitors’, no cases have been registered against them. The role of BJP leader Kapil Mishra, has shockingly not attracted the merest police scrutiny; even though he stood in North East Delhi on February 23, 2020, along with the Deputy Commissioner of Police, and threatened that his supporters would ‘take matters into their own hands’ if the CAA protesters were not removed. This speech is widely alleged to have triggered the violence between 23 and 26 February 2020. Instead, young protestors have been targeted and thrown into jail.

The youth of any nation are its future. It is their voices we amplify today. As global citizens, we pledge our solidarity with each of those falsely charged. Seeking justice for them, is doing justice to our collective, democratic futures.

We call on the Government of India to:

• Free Umar Khalid and all those falsely implicated and unjustly incarcerated for protesting against the CAA-NRC that denies equal citizenship rights.
• Ensure that the Delhi Police investigates the Delhi riots with impartiality under the oath they took as public servants bound by the Constitution of India.

Endorsed by:

• Noam Chomsky, Writer, Professor of Linguistics, USA
• Angela Davis, Professor, philosopher, activist, writer, USA
• Rajmohan Gandhi, Writer, (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi)
• Parikh, 94 year old freedom fighter jailed by British in 1942
• Priyamvada Gopal, Professor, Cambridge University, UK, (grand-daughter of S. Radhakrishnan, former President of India)
• Sir Richard Jolly, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK
• James Galbraith, Professor, USA, son of J. K. Galbraith former US Ambassador to India
• Raja Vemula, Law student, (brother of Rohith Vemula)
• Medha Patkar, Social Activist
• Sandeep Pande, Social worker, Magsaysay Awardee
• Aruna Roy, Social Activist, India
• Admiral Ramdas, Former Chief of Indian Navy
• Lalita Ramdas, Social Worker
• Salman Rushdie, Writer
• P. Sainath, Writer, Economic and Political Analyst
• Mira Nair, Filmmaker
• Amitav Ghosh, Writer
• Meena Kandasamy, Poet and writer
• Tariq Ali, Writer
• Ramchandra Guha, Historian and Columnist
• Arundhati Roy, Writer
• Suraj Yengde, Writer, Fellow Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, USA
• Ratna Pathak Shah, Actor and Educationist
• Raju Rajgopal, Co-founder – Hindus for Human Rights
• Sunita Vishwanath, Co-founder – Hindus for Human Rights
• Vijay Prashad, LeftWord Books
• Partha Chatterjee, Professor, Columbia University,USA
• Irfan Habib, Professor, Aligarh Muslim University
• Jan Breman, Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Achille Mbembe, Professor, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• David Hardiman, Professor, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Warwick, UK
• Prabhat Patnaik, Professor Emeritus, JNU
• Sheldon Pollock, Professor, Columbia University, USA, Sanskrit Scholar
• Akeel Bilgrami, Professor, Columbia University, USA
• Homi Bhabha, Professor, Harvard University, USA
• Mahmood Mamdani, Professor, Columbia University, USA
• Carlo Ginzburg, Professor Emeritus, University of California- Los Angeles, USA
• Sumit Sarkar, Professor Emeritus, Delhi University, USA
• Sugata Bose, Professor, Tufts University, USA
• Veena Das, Professor, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Claude Markovits, Center National de la Recherche Sceintifique, Paris
• Gyanendra Pandey, Professor, Emory University, USA
• Barbara Harriss-White, Professor Emerita, London School of Economics, UK
• Judith Butler, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Romila Thapar, Professor Emeritus, JNU
• Utsa Patnaik, Professor, Center for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU.
• Tanika Sarkar, RetdProfessor, JNU
• Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor, Stanford University, USA
• David Ludden, Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• John Stratton Hawley, Professor, Columbia University, USA
• Robert Chambers, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK
• James Laine, Professor, Macalaster College, USA
• Nivedita Menon, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Gyan Prakash, Professor, Princeton University, USA
• Audrey Truschke, Professor, Rutgers University, USA
• Sumit Guha, Professor, University of Texas, Austin, USA
• Ravi Ahuja, University of Gottingen, Germany
• Arjun Appadurai, Professor, Media, Culture and Communication, NYU, USA
• Timothy Mitchell, Professor, Columbia University, USA
• Vinay Gidwani, Professor, University of Minnesota, USA
• Manuela Boatcă, Professor, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
• Dilip Menon, Professor, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• Patrick Heller, Professor, Brown University, USA
• Ajay Skaria, Professor, University of Minnesota, USA
• Angana Chatterjee, Centre for race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley., USA
• Wendy Brown, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Lawrence Cohen, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Premesh Lalu, Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
• Indrani Chatterjee, Professor, University of Texas, Austin, USA
• Ashutosh Varshney, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, Brown University, USA
• Srirupa Roy, Professor, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Gottingen, Germany
• Usuf Chikte, Professor, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
• Andrew Sartori, Professor, New York University, USA
• Rebecca Karl, New York University, USA
• Dipti Khera, Professor, New York University, USA
• Jyotsna Kapur, Professor, University of Southern Illinois, USA
• Satish Deshpande, Professor, Delhi School of Economics, India
• Surajit Mazumdar, Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University
• Nandini Sundar, Professor, Delhi School of Economics
• Neera Chandok, Professor, retd., Department of Political Science, delhi University
• Sangeeta Dasgupta,Center for Historical Studies, JNU
• Linda Hess, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Stanford University, USA
• Julia Lesage, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon, USA
• Ania Loomba, Professor, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Jean Michel Frodon, Film critic and Professor, Political Science Institute, Paris, France
• Rasha Salti, Commissioning editor (Arte), Palestine/Lebanon
• Barberine Feinberg, Artistic Director, Jean Rouch International Film Festival, France
• Roshila Nair, Black Feminist and Writer, South Africa
• Adil Mohommad, International Monetary Fund
• Usha Iyer, Professor, Stanford University, USA
• Priya Jaikumar, Professor, University of Southern California, USA
• Neepa Majumdar, Professor, University of Pittsburgh, USA
• Kuhu Tanvir, Professor, Michigan State University, USA
• Anna Bigelow, Professor, Stanford University, USA
• Aditi Chandra, Professor, University of California, Merced, USA
• Priya Satia, Professor, Stanford University, USA
• Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience, MIT, USA
• Abha Sur, Professor, MIT, USA
• Vijaya Nagarajan, Professor, University of San Francisco, USA
• Chris Marrewa Karwoski, Fellow, Bowdoin College, USA
• Jaya Misra, Professor, University of Massachusetts, USA
• Robert Pollin, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
• Mark Fleishman, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Alex Müller, Professor, University of Göttingen, Germany
• Fiona Ross, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Moinak Biswas, Professor, Jadavpur University
• Bodhisattva Kar, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Deirdre Prins-Solani, Heitage Consultant and Peacebuilder, South Africa
• Pratik Chakrabarti, Professor , University of Manchester, UK
• Paola Bacchetta, Professor, Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Tania Haberland, Poet and Activist, South Africa
• Diane Shea, Faculty, Dawson College, Montreal, Canada
• Amir Hussain, Chair and Professor, Loyola Marymount University
• Malika Ndlovu, poet and arts activist, South Africa
• Marlize Swanepoel, Director, Sp(i)eel Creative Arts Therapies Collective, South Africa
• Chantal Snyman, playwright and Arts for Youth facilitator, South Africa
• Shailaja Rao, Old Dominion University, USA
• Amrit Wilson, South Asia Solidarity Group, UK
• Kalpana Wilson, Lecturer, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
• Sindhuja Sankaran, Professor,Jagiellonian University, Poland
• W.T. Van Eg Dom, Arden University, UK
• Nitasha Kaul, Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster, UK
• Ananya Vajpeyi, Center for Study Developing Societies, New Delhi
• M. V. Ramana, Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Poulomi Saha, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Aarti Sethi, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Abhishek Kaicker, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Dibyesh Anand, Professor, University of Westminster, UK
• Ashok Prasad, Professor,Colorado State University, USA
• Ramaa Vasudevan, Professor, Colorado State University, USA
• Elissa Braunstein, Professor and Chair of Economics, Colorado State University, USA
• Alpa Shah, Professor, London School of Economics, UK
• Amrita Ibrahim, Professor, Georgetown University, USA
• Ritika Shrimali, Professor, Huron University College, London, UK
• Malini Sur, Professor, Western Sydney University, Australia
• Priya Chacko, Professor, University of Adelaide, Australia
• Amrita Pande, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Ruchi Chaturvedi, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Asanda Benya, Senior Lecturer, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Faisal Garba, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Talia Meer, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Anandaroop Sen, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Natasha Vally, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Suren Pillay, Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
• Sita Venkateswar, Professor, Massey University, New Zealand
• Sumanth Gopinath, Professor, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA
• Malavika Kasturi, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
• Sa’diyya Shaikh, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Debjani Bhattacharyya, Professor, Drexel University, USA
• Srila Roy, Professor, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
• Barbara Boswell, Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
• Millie Thayer, Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
• Aditya Balasubramanian, Professor, National University, Canberra, Australia
• Andrew B. Liu, Professor, Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA
• Meghna Chaudhuri, Professor, Boston College, USA
• Mekhola Gomes, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
• Mehul Elliott-Joshi,Bational Health Service, UK
• Philippa Kabali-kagwa, Development Facilitator, Coach and Author, South Africa
• Andrew Ollett, Professor, University of Chicago, USA
• Arunabh Ghosh, Professor, Harvard University, USA
• Andrea Marion Pinkney, Professor, McGill University, Canada
• Supriya Gandhi, Professor, Yale University, USA
• Hamsa Stainton, Professor, McGill University, Canada
• Patton Burchett, Professor, The College of William and Mary, USA
• Abeer Y. Hoque, Writer, Photographer
• Jaclyn Michael, Professor, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA
• Teena Purohit, Professor, Boston University, USA
• Gowri Vijayakumar, Professor, Brandeis University, USA
• Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Writer, New Delhi
• Kajri Jain, Professor University of Toronto, Canada
• Biju Mathews, Professor, Rider University, New Jersey, USA
• Raza Mir, Professor, William Patterson University, New Jersey, USA
• Sharad Chari, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Ishita Pande, Professor Queen’s University, Canada
• Bhavani Raman, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
• Michael Levien, Professor, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Rachel Sturman, Professor, Bowdoin College, USA
• Matthew Shutzer, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, USA
• Naveena Naqvi, Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Jens Lerche, Reader at SOAS, University of London, UK
• Kristin Plys, Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
• Aditya Ramesh, Professor, University of Manchester, UK
• Koni Benson, Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
• David Boyk, Professor, Northwestern University, USA
• Jasmina Brankovic, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, South Africa
• Aviroop Sengupta, , Columbia University, USA
• Shaunna Rodrigues, , Columbia University, USA
• Sohini Chattopadhyay, , Columbia University, USA
• Uponita Mukherjee, , Columbia University, USA
• Samyak Ghosh, , Columbia University, USA
• Sayori Ghoshal, , Columbia University, USA
• Parnisha Sarkar, , University of Toronto, Canada
• William Mazzarella, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago , USA
• Amitava Kumar, Dept. of English, Vassar College, USA
• James Malinson, Indology and Yoga Studies, SOAS, University of London, UK
• Jyoti Puri, Department of Sociology, Simmons University, USA
• M. R. Sharan, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Global Development
• D.H. Shanahan, PhD Candidate, Cambridge University, UK
• Stuti Pachisia, PhD Candidate, Faculty of English, Cambridge University, UK
• Apurva Bamezai, PhD Candidate, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• Balaji Narasimhan, Concerned Citizen
• Ali Kazimi, Filmmaker
• Mark Achbar, Filmmaker
• Lalit Vachani, Filmmaker, Researcher, University of Gottingen, Germany
• Anand Patwardhan, Filmmaker
• Nakul Sawhney, Filmmaker