Maktoob / by Mohd Alfaz Ali

To mark Prisoners’ Day honestly is to notice this asymmetry, not just to honor the dead of 1929. It is to ask why a nation can revere its historical political prisoners while refusing that name to those living through an almost identical experience today
On 13th September 1929, Jatin Das died in Lahore Central Jail after sixty-three days without food. He had not committed a violent act. His crime, in the eyes of the colonial state, was conviction, the belief that India should govern itself. His body, wasting through week after week of hunger strike, became the only language of protest still available to a man the state had already decided to silence through confinement rather than trial. His death is why September 13th is observed as Prisoners’ Day.
… Sharjeel Imam has been in Jail without trial since 2020. Umar Khalid’s case has moved at a similar pace. The Bhima Koregaon accused, several of them elderly, some in visibly deteriorating health, have spent years as undertrials on charges that have yet to be substantively tested in court. 
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▪ Voices From Prison | A Legacy Of Detention: Weaponisation Of PDA, TADA, NSA And UAPA Laws Since Independence (Outlook / Jan 2026)
▪ Incarceration As Politics: A Timeline Of Political Prisoners In Independent India (Outlook / Jan 2026)
▪ Justice On Hold: How India’s Trial Courts Are Creating a New Class of Political Prisoners—Those Accused Of ‘Terrorism’ (article 14 / Dec 2025)
▪ The Grammar of the Power to Arrest and Search under UAPA (Constitutional Law and Philosophy | by Hany Babu and Surendra Gadling | Jul 2025)
▪ Who Is a ‘Political Prisoner’? Rona Wilson Says Caste and Religion Are Key to the Answer (The Wire / Feb 2025)
▪ UAPA – CRIMINALISING DISSENT AND STATE TERROR – Study of UAPA Abuse in India, 2009-2022 (PUCL / Sep 2022). Download report
▪ Punished without trial: How India’s political prisoners are being denied basic rights in jail (Scroll.in / Aug 2022)