This week on Hafta, Manisha Pande, Raman Kirpal, Anand Vardhan and Rinchen Norbu are joined by historian Ramachandra Guha.   

The discussion with historian Ramachandra Guha began with the continued incarceration of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, both of whom have spent nearly six years in jail without trial. 

Using Khalid’s recently published academic work as a starting point, the conversation expanded into a wider examination of justice, the judiciary, policing, dissent, and the health of Indian democracy.

Guha described the current moment as darker than some earlier phases of Indian history: “The whole judicial process today – beginning with the police, beginning with the FIRs, beginning with the lower courts, going right up – we don’t know whether their minds are clouded by majoritarian communal sentiment.” 

He argued that laws like UAPA have transformed pre-trial detention into a tool that can wreck a bright scholar’s career: “This is a victim of a harsh, completely anti-democratic law… my name is Ramachandra Guha and his name is Umar Khalid — that has to do something with the fact that I’m speaking to you here as a free man and writing my books while he’s incarcerated.”

Manisha noted that Khalid's case has unfolded alongside a public culture that increasingly demonises students, researchers and universities. She argued that discussing the quality of Khalid's scholarship was important because public discourse had reduced higher education to caricature and suspicion. 

Raman pointed to a contradiction in the treatment of UAPA cases. Referring to Supreme Court precedents that recognised prolonged incarceration as grounds for bail, he said: “This is a trial-less conviction that Umar Khalid and others are facing.”

Rinchen was even more direct in his criticism of the judiciary. Drawing from Hansal Mehta’s film Shahid, he questioned whether the justice system was still living up to its promise. “Nearly six years in jail without trial is an abomination in a democracy, whichever way you slice it,” he said, arguing that responsibility ultimately rests with the courts, from the trial court to the Supreme Court.

The panel then discussed the rise of vigilante groups and their relationship with police and political actors. Rinchen noted that the communalisation of policing in India is not a wholly new phenomenon but has intensified; furthermore, the spread and emboldening of vigilante groups like the Bajrang Dal in the last decade have created a harder-to-reverse dynamic. Raman summarised the practical effect: “Bajrang Dal and the police – they are hand in glove.”

Pivoting to the current political landscape, Guha reflected on why mass nonviolent protests are harder to build today: tighter restrictions on public assembly, judicially sanctioned limits on protest spaces, and what he called the distracting effects of smartphones and social media. “The state does not want protest… and the courts have been complicit in this,” he said. 

All this and more.