Prisoner No. 626710 is Present is a chronicle of activity as well as stasis. In Lalit Vachani’s documentary about Umar Khalid, there is the dynamism of political activism. There is also the forced waiting that follows an arrest with no trial in sight.
Vachani’s film explores the lead-up to Khalid’s arrest on September 13, 2020, on allegations that he was among the “masterminds” behind the riots that had taken place in New Delhi earlier that year. Still awaiting a trial and having been refused bail several times, Khalid has become one of the most potent symbols of the crackdown on civil rights in the Modi era.
The documentary lays out the circumstances leading to the former Jawaharlal Nehru University research scholar’s arrest alongside well the effects of his incarceration on his partner Banojyotsna Lahiri. When Lahiri first met Khalid at JNU, he soon became known as “the boy who relentlessly asked questions”, she tells Vachani.
The 59-minute film has footage of Khalid at protests against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. The narrative places the arrest of the articulate, fiery Khalid in the context of the larger crackdown on the people’s movements that protested against the Bharatiya Janata Party-government’s citizenship policies as well as actions against Muslim dissenters.
Prisoner No. 626710 is Present flows from Vachani’s previously acclaimed documentaries on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. The Boy in the Branch (1993) and its follow-up The Men in the Tree (2002) provide a rare look at the Hindutva spearhead from within.
The two films follow the same set of RSS members. In the first documentary, they are children, being indoctrinated into the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology through games and physical activities. In the second documentary, they are adults who have participated in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and take pride in the Sangh’s political gains.
Vachani had aimed to make a third film in this series, he told Scroll. In 2016, he had gathered footage for this project but a great deal had changed – most importantly, the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, had wrested control of the government.
“I knew that the RSS would gain power, but I didn’t think that the takeover would take a malevolent form so quickly,” observed Vachani, referring to the manner in which the Modi regime has weaponised official institutions, such as the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate.
“I had even begun cutting scenes for the third film, but it was becoming very factual, so I decided to change tack,” Vachani added.
Instead, Vachani decided to make a series of shorter films on the march of Hindutva. Several of the student activists he was following were being jailed in the Delhi riots case. Many of them, such as Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and Mareen Haider, are Muslim. Prisoner No. 626710 is Present is the first of his planned films.
“If you look at the spectrum of Khalid’s speeches, he is fearless and irreverent too,” Vachani said. For instance, the film has a clip of Khalid pointing out that activists like him do not need to prove their patriotic credentials since it took the RSS until the early 2000s to start hoisting the Indian flag at its Nagpur headquarters.
In addition to supplying a clear chronology of the events leading up to Khalid’s arrest and his continued incarceration, Vachani’s documentary also reveals the toll his travails have had on his friends, especially Banojyotsna Lahiri.
“She is simply remarkable for what she has gone through,” Vachani observed. In the film, Lahiri talks about never missing a mulaqaat (an officially scheduled jail meeting) with Khalid. “We try to keep it jovial,” Lahiri tells Vachani. “We try to laugh”.
Adds artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a strong supporter of Khalid: “To have your time weigh on you, to be cut off and to have that sense that the world treats you like a criminal, this is not an easy thing for any young person.”
Khalid has spending his time behind bars reading. “He has almost read close to 200 books now,” Lahiri says.
Lahiri has bought a bookshelf just to store the books that Khalid passes on after he has finished reading them. She shows Vachani the first book Khalid took along with him when he was jailed – Vikram Seth’s 1,488-page-long A Suitable Boy. The books are marked “Shipped to Tihar Jail.”
There are also photographs of the seven days of temporary freedom granted to Khalid in January 2023, when he was given interim bail for a wedding in the family. “What is the point of talking about when he is going to come out?” Lahiri asks Vachani. “We are framed in a completely fictitious political case with no legal bearing. Any court with some kind of grit can see through and dismiss the case and he can come out the next day. If the court is not ready to stand up to that occasion, I don’t know long it can go on.”