Process as punishment A six-year wait for a trial that has not begun raises hard questions about India's anti-terror law — and about the state's confidence in its own evidence IN THIHAR JAIL, on the outskirts of Delhi, a prisoner has spent six years waiting for something that has not yet happened: the start of his own trial. Umar Khalid, a historian arrested in September 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in connection with riots in north-east Delhi that year, has aged from 33 to 39 behind bars without charges being formally framed, let alone a verdict reached. His case has become the most closely watched example of a broader pattern that critics call "process as punishment": a system in which the ordeal of prolonged incarceration, rather than any eventual conviction, becomes the real sentence. This is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon — pre-trial detention is used and abused in democracies from Brazil to the Philippines. But the scale and d...
Manusmriti was supposedly buried decades ago. India keeps digging it back up A DALIT speaker of a state legislature is insulted. Public outrage, rightly, follows. Then, almost reflexively, comes a second wave of commentary — not about the insult itself, but about the caste of the man who delivered the rebuke. Was he Dalit enough? Should the retaliation have come from a fellow Dalit, an upper-caste ally, a woman, a Brahmin, a Backward Class leader? The question is absurd on its face. An insult against dignity does not require a caste-matched avenger. Yet in modern India, even movements built to dismantle caste hierarchy find themselves, again and again, reaching for caste as the measuring stick of legitimacy. That reflex is worth examining, because it says less about the insult than about how deeply the logic of an ancient text has lodged itself in the modern mind. That text is the Manusmriti, a Sanskrit law code compiled roughly two millennia ago, and its intellectual scaffolding p...