“When my husband left home that day, he was fine. A day later, I saw him in a wheelchair. It’s been 300 days since then,” Nargis Saifi said, when we spoke in late December. Her husband, Khalid Saifi, was arrested by Delhi Police on 26 February 2020, and has been incarcerated in the city’s Mandoli Jail since then. When we first met Nargis months ago, she was scared and distraught. This time, her tremulous voice was transformed. “I rarely used to go out. But as time went by, I realised that it’s a long fight and garnered enough courage to fight. Many of Khalid’s friends and activists offered support. I attended several online meetings for Khalid’s release.” The 34-year-old is a homemaker and a mother to three young children. “Earlier, my children would ask me every day when their father will return. Somehow, they understood the fact that he will not come home soon. But they are optimistic.” Nargis, too, held out hope. “Khalid was arrested for no reason. They want people to be afraid. They want to threaten the people who fight for truth and justice.”
Khalid stands accused of various crimes in three cases related to the communal violence that ripped through the capital’s northeast district in the last week of February 2020. The charges against him—including one under the dreaded anti-terrorism Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—range from rioting, obstructing a public servant from discharging their duty, unlawful assembly, securing funds for illegal activities from illegal sources, and attempt to murder. On 4 November, a Delhi court granted him bail in the case pertaining to the First Information Report 101 of 2020. Khalid was arrested in this case on 6 June, while he was already in jail for the other two cases. While issuing the bail order, the additional sessions judge noted that the charges against Khalid were based on “insignificant material,” that there was no proof of his presence at the crime scene and the chargesheet displayed “total non-application of mind by the police which went to the extent of vindictiveness.”
The judge lambasted the police’s claims of Khalid’s involvement in a “conspiracy” to instigate the violence. The police had based this claim on a witness’s second statement, recorded on 27 September—an earlier statement by the same witness recorded in May did not mention Khalid with regard to the “criminal conspiracy.” Notably, this second statement was taken just over two weeks after Khalid was granted bail in the first case lodged against him—under FIR 44 of 2020—for which he had been arrested on 26 February. Khalid continues to be in jail for the third case, the now infamous Delhi riots conspiracy case, under FIR 59 of 2020. The Special Cell of the Delhi Police arrested him in this case on 21 March, and subsequently charged him under several sections of the UAPA.
Over the years, the 39-year-old Khalid has donned several roles—activist, political worker, philanthropist, social worker, community leader, organiser, mediator, businessman, all alongside being a doting family man who has schooled his children in the vocabulary of democratic principles. Friends and family spoke to us of his passion, his piety and his unwavering commitment to the notion of justice. Nargis recalled how, out of worry, she had often tried unsuccessfully to dissuade him from activism. “He would tell me that he is not doing it for himself but for our people. He believed there is no need to fear unless we do something wrong.” Khalid, like several others languishing in jails across the country on arbitrary and suspect allegations, has become a leitmotif of the present times—an assertive member of a minority community who dared to dissent, and suffered for it. Rights activists, family members, lawyers, and Khalid’s colleagues that we spoke to, all said that Khalid’s only crime was that he was a Muslim who raised his voice in protest. “Khalid had dissent in his blood,” Salimuddin, a friend of his, told us. The circumstances surrounding Khalid’s arrest and his continued incarceration speak to this.
Khalid was born in a family deeply steeped in the ethos of the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic revivalist group. He grew up in his family home in Delhi’s Khureji Khas neighbourhood along with eight siblings. His father, Abdul Lateef, had an ancestral business of selling furniture, and had migrated from Muradabad district in Uttar Pradesh to Delhi. Lateef was an influential businessman and well known among the Muradabadi trader community. The family is devout, and Khalid grew up reading Tablighi literature. Since childhood, he regularly attended the group’s meetings, with Lateef.
In the early 2000s, Khalid moved to Pune for his education and completed his bachelors’ degree from Symbiosis College. He went on to complete a master’s in business administration from the same institution. After coming back from Pune, he joined the family business.
Nargis and Khalid got married in 2006. They have three children—the eldest, a boy, is currently in the sixth standard and their two girls are in the fifth and second standard, respectively. Nargis told us that in 2008, after Lateef passed away, both of them went to Medina for Hajj. “From there, he decided that he will also do Hajj travel business because it’s a great service. The furniture business involved a lot of traveling. Khalid felt that compared to the furniture business, Hajj travel is peaceful and involves halal money.” Nargis said that during the trip to Medina they met Abdul Majid Anwar, also known as Maulana Majid. Majid ran a Hajj travel service called Madiha International at Krishna Nagar, in Delhi. In 2009, Khalid began collaborating with Majid and entered the Hajj-travel-services sector. Two years later, after securing a Hajj licence, Khalid started his own company, Al Lateef Hospitality and Interiors Private Limited, in Khureji Khas. He later renamed the firm Al Lateef Hajj and Umra Travels.
Nargis told us that ever since she had known Khalid, he had always been involved in some form of philanthropy. “He used to donate to orphanages and sponsor under-privileged kids,” she said. In 2012, Khalid and Majid formed an education trust called New Education & Welfare Organisation to streamline their charity work. Majid told us, “The trust provided scholarships to underprivileged students in Khureji Khas, sponsored orphans, distributed rations to destitute widows and distributed clothes to the needy.” The trust was functional till Khalid’s arrest in 2020. Salimuddin, who is a resident of Khureji Khas, told us that one of his family members, a young girl, “studies with Khalid bhai’s scholarship.” He added, “Not just in my house, but almost every house in Khureji has a child studying with their help. In every meeting, he talked about the necessity of educating everyone.”
As Majid and Khalid began expanding their business, the former told us, Khalid realised that bribery was rampant in the public and private circles of Delhi. “So, in 2012, Khalid decided to join the India Against Corruption movement,” Majid said, referring to a nationwide agitation spearheaded by the activist Anna Hazare. “As the Aam Aadmi Party evolved out of the IAC, Khalid became a part of AAP since its inception.” He told us that Khalid soon rose to become a prominent figure in the minority factions of AAP, as he had the support of the Muradabadi Muslim traders and the Tablighi Jamaat groups in Delhi. Majid himself is the son-in-law of the AAP leader Haji Yunus. According to his family and friends, Khalid had developed a friendly relationship with the leaders of the AAP at the time—Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, Yogendra Yadav, Gopal Rai, Kumar Vishwas, Atishi and Yunus.
Yadav told us that he first met Khalid during the 2013 Delhi assembly election campaign. Khalid had organised a campaign meeting at Khureji Khas and Yadav was invited to address it. “Usually, politics take place in two separate segments. What impressed me that time was when Khalid called the meeting, people from both Hindu and Muslim communities were present.” Yadav added, “He genuinely believed in the alternate politics which the AAP promised then. He was not at all a careerist.”
Majid told us that in the 2013 assembly elections, Khalid helped with organising the AAP’s campaigns and fundraising. Khalid also campaigned for the AAP in the assembly elections of other states—he would usually be deputed to the Muslim-dominated areas. For instance, in the 2017 Punjab assembly elections, Khalid campaigned for Arshad Khan, the AAP’s candidate from Malerkotla, a constituency with 68.5 percent Muslim voters. He was similarly sent to other Muslim areas for the AAP’s campaigns in Karnataka and Goa, during the respective assembly elections. However, several people who worked with him in the AAP said that Khalid’s approach was more inclusive. Abdur Rahman, an AAP member from Malerkotla who campaigned with Khalid in 2017, said, “The campaign took us to the people no one listens to, because of him. Khalid bhai tried to reach out to the most deprived sections of the voters in the constituency, no matter who they were.”
According to his friends, Khalid had his first disagreement with the AAP leadership during the Delhi municipal corporation elections of 2017, when the party refused to field Muslim candidates from the Khureji Khas area. Muhammed Shihad, a close friend of Khalid’s, narrated what Khalid had told him and several of his friends. Shihad said that according to Khalid, the party’s leadership “told him that even if they don’t have Muslims as candidates, they will get Muslim votes. But if they don’t make others”—referring to Hindus—“as candidates, they will not vote for us.” Shihad told us that Khalid and the AAP’s leadership clashed again that year when Khalid requested the party to put forward a statement on the victimisation of the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, and the leadership refused.
“The party’s silence on hate crimes and mob lynching also made Khalid rethink the AAP membership and he finally decided to leave the party in 2017,” Shihad told us. Yadav, who had also left AAP by then, told us that Khalid shared his disillusionment with the party’s workings with him. But, despite his differences, friends and family said that Khalid credits his time in the party as a huge learning experience.
According to Shihad, two factors “gave a sharp edge to Khalid’s politics.” Khalid spent a lot of time in Muslim communities across the country because of the AAP’s insistence on sending him to Muslim-majority areas. “The experience from these places made him realise that there is huge discrimination in the lives and progress of individuals in these areas,” Shihad said. Khalid shared these concerns with several of their friends and members of the AAP on numerous occasions. The second factor, according to Shihad—other friends of Khalid concurred—was the AAP’s attitude towards concerns of the Muslim community. The party wanted Muslim votes but would refuse to give representation to Muslim candidates and the communities’ issues. Khalid was beginning to realise that this was symptomatic of electoral politics across the country.
Perhaps, this provided the context for the next milestone in Khalid’s trajectory: United Against Hate. According to its members, UAH is a platform which provides the space for campaigns whose main objective is to counter the “politics of hatred.” The UAH operates as a loose coalition of individuals and organisations, and has no formal structure, membership or even a charter. According to several people involved in UAH, the catalyst for the group’s formation was the lynching of Mohammad Junaid, a 15-year-old, in Haryana’s Ballabhgarh, in June 2017.
Khalid is one of UAH’s founding members, along with Shihad, the student leader Umar Khalid, and rights activists Banjyostna Lahiri, Nahas Mala, Sharique Ansar, Nadeem Khan, among others. (Umar is now incarcerated under the UAPA in the same FIR as Khalid.) The 42-year-old Nadeem first met Khalid Saifi at the Parliament Street police station in Delhi, after both were detained for participating in a protest against mob lynching, which was organised by the National Campaign Against Mob Lynching, in July 2017. Nadeem told us that the idea of UAH first germinated after this protest as he, Khalid and several other activists decided that communal polarisation needed to be countered with a strong grassroots campaign across the country. “We realised we needed public participation.”
On 30 July 2017, the UAH organised its first campaign, and at least 100 motorcycles left from Mandi House in Delhi for Mewat, in Haryana, to promote a message of communal harmony—the region had witnessed several incidents of mob lynching in recent months. The bike rally was organised under the UAH’s banner and carried the slogan: “Nafrat Ke Kilaf Hum Sub Ke Awaz”— our voices united against hate. Footage of the rally went viral on social media and local residents lent significant support to the campaign. According to Lahiri, the platform “became a voice that would address the elephant in the room. We thought it’s necessary to take an initiative on speaking out against mob lynching and fight for justice. We decided to follow up on the legal works of the cases and help the families of the mob-lynching victims.”
Since then, UAH has organised a series of rallies, community meetings, fact-finding missions and press conferences against hate crimes. According to Lahiri, of all the lynchings that happened across north India until 2019, UAH volunteers visited roughly 80 percent of the victims’ families. Khalid was an active participant in several of these visits.
One of the UAH’s key interventions was a fact-finding mission to the town of Kasganj, in Uttar Pradesh, on 2 February 2018. Kasganj had witnessed communal violence for almost a week after a dispute over a flag-hoisting ceremony on 26 January. Besides Khalid and Lahiri, the UAH’s team included the retired IPS officer SR Darapuri; the senior journalists Amit Sengupta, Hasanul Banna and Aleemullah Khan; and the activist Rakhi Sehgal. The team spoke to locals, the police and the administration. They came to the conclusion that the violence was pre-meditated and not spontaneous, as the state government had claimed.
Then in July 2018, the UAH decided to investigate the rising incidents of mob lynching in Jharkhand. Several Muslim men had been killed in the state in previous years, including a fourth-grade student, who was lynched and hung from a tree in March 2016.
Late in September, a team from UAH, along with journalists and lawyers, visited Atroli village in Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, to conduct a fact-finding mission. On 20 September, Mustakeem and Naushad, two Muslim youth, had been killed in an encounter that their families claimed was fake. The team’s findings contradicted the police’s claims.
Nadeem told us that in June 2019, he and Khalid had visited Subodh Singh’s home. Subodh, an inspector, was killed by a mob in cow-related violence at Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh, in December the previous year. The family was in search of a good lawyer to file a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court. “Khalid told us that we should have very professional advice in the case and he suggested Sanjay Hegde’s name to us,” Shrey Pratap Singh, Subodh’s son told us. “He asked us about the details of the case. He was very keen to help us irrespective of our religious identity.”
In July 2019, UAH launched a toll-free number, named Helpline Against Hate. Nadeem told us, “We got at least five thousand calls on the first day, mostly to check if the number was genuine and the people are reliable.” In fact, a report in Livemint noted that the helpline received almost seven thousand calls the first day. Nadeem added that at least four people monitored the helpline continuously. He said that Khalid was dedicated towards this endeavour. “He would attend the calls himself and coordinate local volunteers to help the victims,” Nadeem said. Nargis told us that Khalid had a separate mobile phone which he kept exclusively for use for the helpline.
Nadeem shared an instance where Khalid played a significant role in preventing a communal altercation in Rajasthan’s Dausa town, by reporting an anti-Hindu communal post. He did not remember the exact date but said it was a few months after the helpline was launched. “A person shared inflammatory posts about Hinduism on Whatsapp groups. A Hindu called the helpline number and informed about the post. Khalid, who attended the call, asked him details of the content and got the contact details of the guy.”
Another incident Nadeem described was when Khalid got a call from a carpet weaver in Panipat, saying that a mob had threatened him and others, demanding they chant “Jai Shree Ram.” Khalid called a local businessman named Nikhil Sharma, Nadeem said. Nikhil had attended several UAH protests and was a volunteer with the group. “Nikhil immediately went to the family of those who threatened the worker and solved the issue.”
As its helpline gained popularity, UAH became the target of certain mainstream media houses. Barely days after its launch, on 16 July 2019, Zee News dedicated an episode of its prime time show, Taal Thok Ke, to claim that the helpline number was the latest effort by the “Tukde-Tukde gang” to defame the country. Tukde-Tukde, which means “into pieces,” is a catchall pejorative used by the right-wing against those they accuse of “anti-national” behaviour. The phrase was first popularised during the 2016 sedition row at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, when students such as Umar Khalid—who later co-founded UAH—were accused of anti-India actions. The title of Zee’s program was, “Desh ki badnaami ke liye tukde-tukde gang ka toll-free agenda”—tukde-tukde gang’s toll-free agenda to malign the nation.
Zee’s targeting of UAH as “tukde-tukde” ties up with the organisation’s support to several issues plaguing JNU. The organisation played a significant role in raising the issue of the disappearance of JNU student Najeeb Ahmed, who went missing in October 2016 and is yet to be traced. “I say with full consciousness of being a JNU student that if UAH people had not taken it upon themselves to sustain the protest, honestly any effort to fight for justice for Najeeb would have fallen flat a long time ago,” Heba Ahmed, a doctoral student at the university, told us. “The JNU students’ protests would have been incomplete without Khalid’s presence. His role is indisputable here,” she added. Heba recalled that on 26 February 2018, students of JNU and a few other universities marched to the Central Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters to demand “Justice For Najeeb.” Khalid gave a speech on the protesters’ behalf, Heba said. Outside the CBI headquarters, Khalid and his friends arranged packets of biryani for everyone. “He took care of the protesters, which not many people do,” Heba continued. “We always saw his son in protests. He was always holding a poster. He is like his father.”
On the second anniversary of Najeeb’s disappearance, his mother Fatima Nafees called for a rally that would head to the Parliament. UAH and many other organisations endorsed the call. They extended an invite to Rohith Vemula’s mother, Radhika Vemula. Rohith, who was from a Dalit community, was a doctoral scholar at the University of Hyderabad. He took his own life in January 2016, after being relentlessly targeted by the administration for his activism. Rohith’s brother, Raja Vemula, told us that it was Khalid who invited them to the rally. Raja had met Khalid multiple times in Delhi at various protest venues. He told us that Khalid booked the flight tickets for him and his mother so that they could attend the rally in support of Najeeb.
With an ever-smiling face, Khalid was a regular presence at almost all of UAH’s activities and protests. Dressed in jeans and polo T-shirts, with his long beard and white skull cap, Khalid could be seen with his family at the protest sites. Shihad said that when his friends pointed out that the children’s school attendance was getting affected, Khalid would respond by saying that children needed to be politically aware.
According to Lahiri, Khalid was physically and mentally involved in every UAH program. “He was also full of ideas. He made T-shirts, mugs, and merchandise of UAH. He also could connect to people very easily. He coordinated meetings and raised funds. He followed up and constantly keep in touch with the people,” she said.
The frequent visits to the families of hate-crime victims, and hearing their stories had taken an emotional toll on Khalid, Nargis told us. “Khalid was so disturbed after seeing all this. Somebody’s husband had died, somebody had lost his father. He wondered how a human being can be killed so brutally. He was stressed after sharing these stories. A mob came, lynched and got away. It’s always the same.” She remembered how disturbed he was when he returned from the home of Junaid, the teenager who was lynched in Ballabhgarh, in Haryana. “Junaid was brutally lynched inside a train for being what he is: a Muslim,” Nargis said. When we spoke to Junaid’s brother Muhammed Qasim, in June this year, he described Khalid as a “strong ally in our fight for justice.” Qasim added, “He cares for other people. Only a few people can stand with the oppressed and fight for justice in the streets. Khalid was one among them.”
Lahiri also said that UAH’s work deeply impacted Khalid. She narrated an incident which occurred when UAH was conducting fact-finding missions in Assam related to the National Register of Citizens. The NRC is a state-ordered exercise that required all residents of Assam to prove their citizenship by providing documents dating back decades. The exercise was devastating for the state’s minority Muslim community, many of whom are poor and illiterate, and faced immense difficulties in navigating the bureaucratic processes.
The UAH was one of the few organisations to actively track the NRC process in Assam, and conducted several visits of the state over a period of 14 months. One of its first visits was in June 2018, when a 12-member UAH team, under Darapuri’s leadership. Khalid and Majid were part of the team. Majid said, “So many people came to us with documents in their hands. So many didn’t even have enough clothes and were living in makeshift tents.”
Lahiri, who was not part of the fact-finding team, told us that she called Khalid to enquire about the situation. “Khalid started crying. He was so stressed after sharing these stories.” Nargis recalled the day Khalid returned to Delhi. “Khalid was very disturbed after he returned from Assam. He was distraught.”
The UAH team released one report highlighting its findings in July 2018, and another report in September 2019, about a month after the final NRC list was published. Both reports were extremely critical of the proceedings.
Nargis told us that after his and the UAH’s ground work on the NRC, Khalid became very worried. “Khalid had witnessed the condition in Assam with his own eyes—hundreds of people helpless, struggling hard to prove their existence, their identity. Many of them had lost their ID proofs in natural or man-made disasters,” she said. “He got really scared and had realised that this situation will happen in the entire country if a nationwide NRC was implemented.”
The Bharatiya Janata Party, which has now been at the helm for two consecutive terms, had promised a nationwide NRC in its manifesto for the 2019 general elections. The union home minister Amit Shah publicly talked about the BJP central government’s intention to implement a nationwide NRC at multiple political rallies, press conferences and interviews. Barely two months after the Assam NRC list was released, in November 2019, Shah told the Rajya Sabha, “The Assam exercise was carried out under a Supreme Court order. NRC will be carried out across the country, will be done in Assam again at the time.” Shah’s mention in the Parliament sparked alarm across the country.
Concurrent to the NRC, the BJP government at the centre had been actively pushing for an amendment to India’s Citizenship Act of 1955, which would make non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh eligible for Indian citizenship. While the NRC had proven to be logistical nightmare and would likely threaten the citizenship status of marginalised sections, the amendment act would pave the way back to citizenship for many of these, except for the Muslim community. The BJP had already introduced the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in 2016—it was passed in the Lok Sabha but stalled by the Rajya Sabha.
Khalid’s fears came to be realised when the union cabinet cleared the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill on 4 December 2019, for introduction in the Parliament. On 7 December, two days before the Parliament tabled the bill, UAH organised a protest against the legislation at Jantar Mantar. Thousands attended the meeting, and UAH called for a civil-disobedience movement against the law. At the protest, Khalid read out the first page of the Constitution, and the crowd repeated it after him. Khalid and other protestors burned a copy of the bill, as a symbol of their protest.
Once the bill was passed in the Parliament on 11 December, protests erupted across the country. UAH joined two collectives, Hum Bharat ke Log—which translates to “we the people of India”—and the Alliance Against CAA/NRC, and protested along with other civil-rights organisations, political parties, and community organisations. Khalid was a visible presence in almost all the protests. Over the coming days, these collectives organised protests against the CAA and the NRC across the country.
The next few months witnessed some of the most extensive protests in independent India. Students, activists, and citizens organised sit-ins, demonstrations and marches, to mark their opposition to the CAA and the NRC. The uprising received an equally brutal response from the state. On 13 December, the students of Jamia Millia Islamia, in Delhi, organised a protest against the CAA and marched towards the Parliament. The Delhi Police lathi charged the protesters and used tear gas on the students. Almost fifty students were detained and several injured. Two days later, as thousands of Jamia students joined the protests, scores of Delhi Police personnel forcibly entered the university and launched a massive crackdown, which included a brutal lathi-charge and tear-gas shelling inside the campus library. Over two hundred people were injured due to police action. The same day, the Uttar Pradesh police launched a similar offensive against protesting students of the Aligarh Muslim University, in Uttar Pradesh. Like in Jamia, the police forcibly entered the campus—including the girls’ hostel—beat up students, dragged them out of their rooms and lobbed tear-gas shells at them. The attacks on university campuses spurred further protests against the CAA in several educational institutions.
As the protests spread, so did the clampdown. In Mangalore, Karnataka, police opened fire at an anti-CAA rally and killed two protesters on 19 December. Uttar Pradesh, ruled by the BJP’s hard-line leader Ajay Singh Bisht, has a sizeable Muslim population. As anti-CAA protests started erupting in city after city, the Uttar Pradesh police launched a brutal crackdown. Between 20 and 24 December, police action against protesters in cities such as Meerut, Kanpur, Bijnor, Sambhal, among others, left at least 23 people dead. In Guwahati, four people were killed in police action against the protests during December. Thousands were arbitrarily arrested and detained across the country, either during the protests or simply on the pretext of one.
As a response to the police violence unleashed against the students in Jamia, women in the Shaheen Bagh locality in Delhi started a peaceful round-the-clock protest against CAA and NRC from mid-December. The sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, led by women who turned out in large numbers, quickly became iconic, inspiring several similar protests across Delhi. Nargis told us that Khalid would attend whichever protest he could, in solidarity.
On 14 January 2020, the women of Khureji Khas in northeast Delhi started a sit-in protest at an open site adjacent to the Hindustan Petroleum petrol pump on the Patparganj road, barely ten minutes away from Khalid’s home. “I came to know about the protest around 2.30 pm. After my children came back from school, I went to the protest site. Most of the ladies had gone there. So I also joined them,” Nargis said. “Whenever I could, I visited the protest site. Children were more interested to go to there. For them, it was an opportunity to play. They enjoyed the carnival-like atmosphere at the venue.” Khalid also visited the site occasionally. On one occasion, Nargis said, the Delhi police lathi-charged the peaceful women protestors. “Khalid reached the spot and negotiated with the police. He also did a Facebook live about the police action,” she told us.
As the Shaheen Bagh protest and its several iterations gained more visibility, the government responded by branding the protesters as anti-nationals, separatist radicals, Islamic terrorists and Pakistani agents. The attempt was to give the protests a distinctly communal identity despite the fact that people from all sections and religions had supported the agitations. Numerous mainstream media houses helped propagate this narrative of the protests being a radical Islamist movement. There were several attempts to provoke violence at the sites, too. For instance, on 1 February, a man named Kapil Gujjar fired shots at the Shaheen Bagh site in full view of the police before he was taken into custody—Gujjar joined the BJP ten months later but was sacked from the party in less than a day. According to news reports, when Gujjar was asked why he fired the shots, he said, “Hamare desh mein aur kiski nahin chalegi, sirf Hinduon ki chalegi”—in our country, only Hindus can have their way, no one else.
Things came to a head in the last week of February. The Bhim Army, a quasi-political Ambedkarite organisation, and its charismatic leader Chandrashekar Azad, had joined the protests early on. Azad had already been booked by the Delhi Police for allegedly instigating violence during a protest in Delhi’s Daryaganj area in late December. Azad and the Bhim Army called for a Bharat Bandh on 23 February to oppose the CAA.
That day, as protesters across sites in Delhi dug-in in observance of the bandh, Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader, delivered a highly provocative speech near the Jaffrabad metro station—hundreds of women were staging a sit-in at the site. During the speech, Mishra declared that if the Delhi Police did not clear the protests at Jaffrabad and neighbouring Chand Bagh, “we will have to come out on the street.” The deputy commissioner of police for northeast Delhi was standing beside him as Mishra spouted communal vitriol.
By that night, almost the entire district was witnessing violent communal attacks. Over the next few days, right-wing mobs stormed across neighbourhoods, chanting “Jai Shri Ram,” and targeting masjids, Muslim homes and businesses, looting or setting fire to them, often abetted—through omission or commission—by the Delhi Police. The nature of the violence was overtly anti-Muslim. People from the community were beaten, attacked and murdered. In the next few days, at least 53 people were killed. Forty of these were Muslims.
By all accounts, Khalid attempted to stem the violence. After some incidents of stone-pelting and fights on 23 February, he became worried for those sitting at the protests, some of which were ongoing. When we spoke to Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi, in July this year, he told us, “On 24 February, we met at the Constitution Club. Khalid was very disturbed because he thought that the violence is being planned against those who were protesting CAA.” He added, “Khalid’s particular concern was the women who blocked the road, conducted dharna at Jaffrabad Metro station. He was particularly concerned that violence could break out there.” He said that he accompanied Khalid and a few other people to Jaffrabad. “Some of us tried to talk to the agitating women. The women were very frustrated and they told us that they had been sitting for two months and the government was not listening to them. They were not ready to vacate the road.”
Apoorvanand said that Khalid then asked if he would accompany him to the Khureji Khas protest site. “Khalid asked my assistance in persuading the women to vacate the road. We had failed at Jaffrabad. But in Khureji, Khalid was hopeful. He talked to protesting women and after persuading, the women agreed to vacate the road for the day. Khalid was very happy,” Apoorvanand said.
However, by 24 February, the incidents of communal trouble had evolved into full scale anti-Muslim violence. According to friends and activists, Khalid, Nadeem, the activists and filmmakers Rahul Roy and Saba Dewan, the rights’ activist and former civil-servant Harsh Mander, along with members of the UAH and people from the civil-society group Karwaan-e-Mohabat, formed a makeshift umbrella organisation, called the Citizen Collective for Peace. Their aim was to coordinate rescue operations and relief works; conduct information verification and dissemination; and offer legal aid and medical help. Khalid decided to take on the task of arranging vehicles and drivers for the rescue operations and to organise food and stay for these fleeing or impacted by the violence, as he was familiar with the area and had local contacts.
Harjit Singh Bhatti, a physician, told us that he called Khalid on the evening of 24 February, and asked for help in arranging large quantities of medicines, first-aid kits, bandages and antiseptics. Bhatti was then the national president of the Progressive Medicos and Scientists Forum—a group comprised of faculty members, scientists, resident doctors and under-graduate students of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, in Delhi. “The next day, Khalid’s friend, a doctor, contacted me from Al Shifa hospital and provided me all those medicines,” Bhatti said, referring to a local hospital that was soon overrun with victims and survivors. “We transported the medicine in the ambulance of PMSF to Al Hind Hospital”—another local medical facility. “The ambulance went till Mustafabad T-point. The medicine was transported from there to Al Hind hospital using motorbikes.”
Around 10 pm on 24 February, a delegation comprising activists such as Khalid and students from Jamia and JNU reached the home of the Delhi deputy chief minister, Manish Sisodia. (Several members of this group, who shared details of the meeting with us, requested anonymity.) The delegation asked Sisodia to intervene and go to the violence-affected area with the chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. According to one member of the group, the delegation reminded Sisodia that protocol dictates that police also have to accompany the ministers, and the presence of senior officials could quell the violence. The member said that Sisodia told them, “I am helpless. We don’t have the control of police force in our hand.” Khalid and the others returned, their hopes dashed.
As the violence continued unabated, the next day, Khalid, along with his family and some protesters from the Khureji Khas site, went to Kejriwal’s residence to ask him to take action to stop the bloodshed. “We reached the CM house around morning. ACP, DCP, and many police officers were there,” Nargis said, referring to the assistant and deputy commissioners of police. “We told them that we need to meet CM. We need to know what he is doing and why he is not stopping the riot.” Instead, the Delhi Police detained Khalid and another person—Khalid recorded the detention and streamed it via Facebook live. In the video, Khalid can be seen sloganeering from inside the police truck: “Dilli police murdabad, Sanghi dalaali band karo”—Down with Delhi Police, stop dealing for the Sangh.
Khalid also expressed his unhappiness at the silence of the rest of Delhi’s citizenry. “You guys sit comfortably and enjoy the video on Facebook. Don’t step out until we all die. Stay happy by scrolling your phone,” he said in the live video. “Don’t go to CM’s home and home minister’s home to protest. Just stay at your home, idle, and enjoy your comfort zone.” At the end of the video, Khalid requested his friends to reach the Civil Lines police station to meet him. Tamanna Pankaj, a lawyer associated with the UAH, reached the station and found Khalid speaking to the station house officer about a constable, Ratan Lal, who had been killed during the violence. “He asked if any help was needed for the constable family and how they are surviving,” Tamanna said. Khalid was later released.
The situation remained unchanged the next day. At around 1 pm on 26 February, Khalid and Nargis had just finished lunch. Nargis stepped out to the balcony. She saw people running away from the Khureji Khas protest site and shops being shut down. “Khalid got a call from someone who said that policemen had come and lathi-charged the protestors,” Nargis said. Khalid rushed to the protest site. In a video report later published by Scroll, Khalid could be seen walking barehanded towards the police on a vacant road and talking to them. Suddenly, three to four police officials cornered him. He was detained.
Khalid was taken to the Jagatpuri police station, which is about three hundred metres from the protest site. There are at least two videos in the public domain of the protest site from that day. One showed Khalid’s detention, where the police can be seen surrounding him. In the other one, shot at the turn to the Jagatpuri police station on the way from the protest site, Khalid can be seen walking to the station. It was around 1.45 pm. He does not appear to have any physical injuries. He was formally arrested at 5.45 pm that day, under the FIR 44 of 2020, which had been registered at 4.15 pm. The FIR named Khalid and two other people—a lawyer, Ishrat Jahan, and an anti-CAA activist, Sabu Ansari. Jahan and Ansari had also been detained from the Khureji Khas site, around the same time as Khalid, and taken to the Jagatpuri station.
Apart from the Section 307 of the Indian Penal Code, of attempt to murder, Khalid was also accused under sections 25 and 27 of the Arms Act—non-bailable offenses focusing on unlawful possession and usage of arms other than for self-defence. The FIR alleged that Khalid provoked the protestors to pelt stones on police officers; gave hate-speeches against the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and Delhi Police; instigated rioting; and provided a country-made gun to a juvenile, to fire at the police. The juvenile was arrested by the police on the night of 27 February and taken to the Jagatpuri station. According to the chargesheet in the case, the police said that the juvenile told them that Khalid provided the gun.
Lawyers Against Atrocities, a group that campaigns for a fair justice-delivery system, visited the Khureji Khas site on 29 February, for a fact-finding mission. They released their report in the first week of March. According to the report, the juvenile’s father said that his son was at home between 12.30 pm and 1.30 pm on 26 February, the time that the police said the firing took place. The report also noted that “the policemen stormed into the protest site brandishing and discharging firearms and proceeded to evict the protestors, beating and injuring several in the process. It is reported that during this process, the police were seen destroying CCTV cameras, notably the one in front of the Hindustan Petroleum Pump”—next to the site.
About half an hour after Khalid had been detained by the police, locals informed Nargis. She tried calling her husband but his phone was switched off. She told us, “Khalid had been detained several times, but his phone would never be switched off. This was the first hint I got that something was seriously wrong.” Nargis decided to call Tamanna immediately.
Tamanna went to the Jagatpuri station, accompanied by lawyers from the Human Rights Law Network, a non-profit legal-aid organisation, and the Indian Civil Liberties Union, a collective of lawyers, students and activists. A journalist accompanied them. Tamanna requested the police to let them meet the detained people. Tamanna alleged—and lawyers present there confirmed this—that not only was she not allowed to meet Khalid, but that the police officers lathi-charged them and threatened the crowd who assembled outside the station to leave. The Delhi Police did not respond to queries regarding this assault on the lawyers.
According to court records, at 9 pm on 26 February, Khalid was produced in front of the metropolitan magistrate at the Karkardooma court. Khalid’s brother, who was present at the premises, along with a few other family members, could not meet him. The magistrate sent Khalid to judicial custody for 14 days. Notably, during the hearing, Khalid told the magistrate that he had been subjected to custodial torture for over half an hour. The court order, which is handwritten, directed an investigation into Khalid’s allegations and noted, “ACP convened to conduct inquiry in this regard.” The Delhi Police did not respond to questions on the status of any such inquiry.
The next day, at around 11 am, Nargis reached the Mandoli prison complex to see Khalid. “I saw him arriving in a wheelchair. His feet were wrapped in bandages up to the knees. One leg was fractured and the muscle of another leg was damaged completely … he was tortured severely.” Nargis continued, “I was speechless, but he was strong. He said that we will fight, the truth cannot be covered for a long time.”
Tamanna told us that she met Khalid in the first week of March. She said Khalid told her that officials at the Jagatpuri station tortured him. “They punched him on his face, nose, and all over the body. They held him by his legs and beat him brutally on his legs and the soles of his feet,” Tamanna said. “His bone got fractured. They hit his fingers with lathis. His ring finger got broken.” She said Khalid told her that the police officers forcibly pulled his beard, hair by hair, so hard that his nose started bleeding. “Police asked him to go to the washroom and clean up his face to stop the bleeding. Khalid told me that inside the washroom, a police officer placed a gun on his waist and asked ‘Do you still want to protest?’” Khalid told Tamanna that the officers used communal slurs against him.
While the FIR 44 does not note any injuries on Khalid, the chargesheet in the case does. As per the chargesheet, at around 4.30 pm on 26 February, Khalid was taken to the Lal Bahadur Shastri Hospital for his medico-legal certificate. The chargesheet, however, does not have the MLC itself. The chargesheet notes the police as saying that when they tried to break up the protests at Khureji Khas on 26 February, Khalid ran from the police, tripped, fell and injured his foot, while the injuries on his hands were caused by protesters who trampled him as they fled the police—this contradicts the video clips of Khalid from that day, in which the police can be seen surrounding him.
On 21 March, the additional sessions judge granted bail to Jahan and Ansari but rejected Khalid’s bail plea. Notably, as Jahan got bail, she and Khalid were booked for the second time, this time under FIR 59, the omnibus FIR under which at least 18 anti-CAA activists were accused of having conspired to cause the riots. According to this FIR, the Delhi riots were a conspiracy hatched by Umar Khalid and his associates, and Tahir Hussain, a former AAP councillor, among others, who were all active in the anti-CAA protests. According to court records, Khalid Saifi was arrested that day by the Special Cell and taken to the Patiala House court. He was remanded to police custody until 5 April, and thereafter remanded to judicial custody.
The FIR 59 was initially registered with bailable sections. Over time, it became an anti-terror case—on 19 April, the Special Cell added sections 13, 16, 17, and 18 of the UAPA to it. These were in addition to at least 15 sections of the IPC, and two sections each of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act of 1984 and the Arms Act.
The Delhi Police then arrested Khalid for the third time on 6 June, in the FIR 101 of 2020, registered at the Khureji Khas police station. He was booked under 12 sections of the IPC. The charge sheet, related to the violence in Chandbagh in northeast Delhi, mentioned that Khalid arranged a “riot-conspiracy” meeting between Hussain and Umar Khalid, at Shaheen Bagh, on 8 January. Over the course of Delhi Police’s sprawling investigation, Hussain has been pegged as among the key conspirators who orchestrated the violence. Nadeem, the UAH activist, however discounted the link being drawn between Hussain and Khalid Saifi. “Both Khalid and Tahir Hussain were part of AAP and belong to the Saifi community, and hence knew each other.” He added, “Khalid was accused of calling Tahir on 25th morning. There is nothing unusual in calling an old friend when a riot breaks out in his place.” He said that Khalid was being made a scapegoat so that the UAH and the anti-CAA movement could be maligned.
During a debate over the violence in the Parliament on 11 March, Shah had implied that UAH was responsible for the Delhi violence. “United Against Hate—the name sounds so pious but look what they advocated,” Shah said. “They said, ‘Trump is about to come, we should block the streets.’” He was referring to the American president Donald Trump’s visit to India. Trump was in Delhi the day the violence broke out. Many BJP leaders and right-wing social media had made similar allegations against the UAH and the anti-CAA campaign. “They call themselves United Against Hate but they themselves spread hate,” Meenakshi Lekhi, a BJP member of Parliament, had said. Media coverage by mainstream pro-government channels furthered this narrative.
The media vilification, in particular, has not been easy on Khalid’s family. “Once Khalid’s wife was watching news related to his arrest on her mobile phone. Her son took the mobile and said that there is no need to watch this kind of nonsense. The family is going through a difficult time,” Nadeem said.
According to Nargis, Khalid maintained a balance between public and private life. “We had such a good relationship. He helped the kids with their homework. He loved picking them up even if we go out. He even helped me with household chores,” Nargis said. She mentioned that in the past year, they had spent Eid and Ramzan without him. The children had spent their birthdays without him. “Khalid is their superhero. The children always ask me, ‘When will abbu come?’ I told them, he will come for Ramzan. Ramzan got over, when will he come? He will come for Eid. Now Eid is also over, when will he come? He will come for your birthday. Now the birthdays are over,” she said. But, she continued, “Children never give up hope. It gives hope to me too. He will come for sure.”
Nargis said that their furniture store has been closed since Khalid’s arrest. Family and friends had been helping them with their expenses. “Khalid was not much concerned about the future. He was satisfied with what he had. He would say, ‘Whatever is written in our destiny will happen. Only God can change it,’” she told us. Nargis believes his faith has helped him survive the past year. “I am allowed to speak to him for five minutes every day. He told me that he started learning English and Urdu inside the jail. He even plays badminton regularly.”
Even jail had not diluted his sense of comradeship for others, she said. “On Diwali, he gifted mithai to fellow prisoners who could not afford it because of the pandemic and the lockdown.” Salimuddin, Khalid’s friend, told us, “He will fight for the oppressed no matter the cost.” He shared how he once saw Khalid openly rebuke a policeman who was shouting at a rickshaw driver. “I heard him saying, ‘The poor are not to be oppressed by your authority, but to be protected.’”
On 2 February 2021, the Karkardooma court held the first physical hearing of the riots conspiracy case—all hearings in that case were being conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Khalid was presented in court, along with the 17 other accused. Nargis and their three children were also present. As the children met Khalid in the packed courtroom, his youngest daughter handed Khalid a vibrantly hand-painted greeting card—it was Khalid’s birthday the next day. It had a squiggly portrait of a smiling Khalid, and a note in the young child’s earnest handwriting, with faint traces of erased lines under the words. There was a moment of quiet emotion in the room as Khalid read his daughter’s note. “Abbu hum aapko bahut yaad karte hain. I love you so much abbu. Aap duniya ke best abbu ho … Abbu aap jaldi wapas aa jao”—Abbu we remember you so much … You are the best abbu in the world. Abbu, please come back soon.
Correction: The caption for the image from Thailand has been changed to correctly identify Nargis Saifi, Khalid Saifi's wife, as the subject. The Caravan regrets the error.