Prisoner No. 626710 is Current is a chronicle of exercise in addition to stasis. In Lalit Vachani’s documentary about Umar Khalid, there may be the dynamism of political activism. There’s additionally the compelled ready that follows an arrest with no trial in sight.
Vachani’s movie explores the lead-up to Khalid’s arrest on September 13, 2020, on allegations that he was among the many “masterminds” behind the riots that had taken place in New Delhi earlier that 12 months. Nonetheless awaiting a trial and having been refused bail a number of occasions, Khalid has turn into some of the potent symbols of the crackdown on civil rights within the Modi period.
The documentary lays out the circumstances resulting in the previous Jawaharlal Nehru College analysis scholar’s arrest alongside the results of his incarceration on his associate Banojyotsna Lahiri. When Lahiri first met Khalid at JNU, he quickly grew to become often known as “the boy who relentlessly requested questions”, she tells Vachani.
The 59-minute movie has footage of Khalid at protests towards the controversial Citizenship Modification Act and the Nationwide Register of Residents. The narrative locations the arrest of the articulate, fiery Khalid within the context of the bigger crackdown on the individuals’s actions that protested towards the Bharatiya Janata Occasion authorities’s citizenship insurance policies in addition to actions towards Muslim dissenters.
Prisoner No. 626710 is Current flows from Vachani’s beforehand acclaimed documentaries on the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. The Boy within the Department (1993) and its follow-up The Males within the Tree (2002) present a uncommon have a look at the Hindutva spearhead from inside.
The 2 movies comply with the identical set of RSS members. Within the first documentary, they’re youngsters, being indoctrinated into the Sangh’s Hindutva ideology by video games and bodily actions. Within the second documentary, they’re adults who’ve participated within the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 and take satisfaction within the Sangh’s political features.
Vachani had aimed to make a 3rd movie on this sequence, he instructed Scroll. In 2016, he had gathered footage for this undertaking however an incredible deal had modified – most significantly, the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, had wrested management of the federal government.
“I knew that the RSS would achieve energy, however I didn’t assume that the takeover would take a malevolent type so shortly,” noticed Vachani, referring to the way through which the Modi regime has weaponised official establishments, such because the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate.
“I had even begun reducing scenes for the third movie, but it surely was changing into very factual, so I made a decision to vary tack,” Vachani added.
As an alternative, Vachani determined to make a sequence of shorter movies on the march of Hindutva. A number of of the scholar activists he was following had been being jailed within the Delhi riots case. Lots of them, comparable to Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and Mareen Haider, are Muslim. Prisoner No. 626710 is Current is the primary of his deliberate movies.
“Should you have a look at the spectrum of Khalid’s speeches, he’s fearless and irreverent too,” Vachani mentioned. As an example, the movie has a clip of Khalid declaring that activists like him don’t have to show their patriotic credentials because it took the RSS till the early 2000s to begin hoisting the Indian flag at its Nagpur headquarters.
Along with supplying a transparent chronology of the occasions main as much as Khalid’s arrest and his continued incarceration, Vachani’s documentary additionally reveals the toll his travails have had on his buddies, particularly Banojyotsna Lahiri.
“She is just outstanding for what she has gone by,” Vachani noticed. Within the movie, Lahiri talks about by no means lacking a mulaqaat (an formally scheduled jail assembly) with Khalid. “We attempt to maintain it jovial,” Lahiri tells Vachani. “We attempt to giggle.”
Provides artist Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a robust supporter of Khalid: “To have your time weigh on you, to be reduce off and to have that sense that the world treats you want a legal, this isn’t a simple factor for any younger particular person.”
Khalid has spending his time behind bars studying. “He has nearly learn near 200 books now,” Lahiri says.
Lahiri has purchased a bookshelf simply to retailer the books that Khalid passes on after he has completed studying them. She reveals Vachani the primary guide Khalid took together with him when he was jailed – Vikram Seth’s 1,488-page-long A Appropriate Boy. The books are marked “Shipped to Tihar Jail.”
There are additionally pictures of the seven days of short-term freedom granted to Khalid in January 2023, when he was given interim bail for a marriage within the household. “What’s the level of speaking about when he’s going to return out?” Lahiri asks Vachani. “We’re framed in a very fictitious political case with no authorized bearing. Any court docket with some form of grit can see by and dismiss the case and he can come out the subsequent day. If the court docket isn’t prepared to face as much as that event, I don’t know lengthy it may possibly go on.”