Film Screening and discussion with director Lalit Vachani

Prisoner No. 626710 is Present

(2023, 60 minutes, in Hindi and English with English subtitles)

Moderated by Debashree Mukherjee (Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies)

Time:  6:00pm – 7:30pm, followed by reception

Location:  Maysles Documentary Film Center, 343 Lenox Avenue/Malcolm X Boulevard (between 127th and 128th Streets)

Subways:  2/3, 4,5,6, A,B,C,D to 125th Street

On September 13, 2020, Umar Khalid, a student leader who recently finished his PhD at  Jawaharlal Nehru University, was arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) – a law that designates individuals as terrorists and allows the Indian state to imprison people without due process. His crime? As an Indian Muslim, he had dared to protest against the new citizenship law that the Indian state was trying to impose on its people.

Using found footage of his past speeches along with a forensic analysis of how he was framed by the right-wing, Hindu nationalist media, Umar Khalid’s close friends Banojyotsna Lahiri and Shuddhabrata Sengupta reconstruct the chronology of events that led to his tragic imprisonment.  It has been over 1,500 days since Umar Khalid was arrested. There have been 15 bail hearing adjournments. His case has not yet come up for trial. He and his friends still await a fair hearing in court.

Lalit Vachani is a documentary filmmaker, lecturer and research scholar at CeMIS (the Centre for Modern Indian Studies) at the University of Göttingen. His documentaries include In Search of Gandhi (2007) and The Salt Stories (2009) which follow the trail of Gandhi’s salt march in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat; The Play Goes On (2005) on the leftist street theatre group, Jana Natya Manch; An Ordinary Election (2015), an in-depth study of an Indian election campaign by a new political party – the AAP (Aam Aadmi Party); and The Boy in the Branch (1993) and The Men in the Tree (2002) which document the ideology and the growth of the RSS and Hindunationalism.

Lalit Vachani studied at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. He is a documentary filmmaker, producer and editor, and director of the documentary production company, Wide Eye Film.