When the first copies of Fractured Communities, Adivasi Histories and Power arrived at our home, my husband and I opened the parcel together. We looked at the cover for a long time. It should have been a happy afternoon. Our son should have been there, signing a copy for us, smiling at our excitement. Instead, he remains in prison under UAPA, where he has spent nearly six years without his trial even beginning.AdvertisementUmar’s book grew out of his doctoral research at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He submitted his thesis in July 2018. By then, he had already been charged with sedition, had already spent time in prison, and had been rusticated from the university he spent years at. I remember him writing whenever he could, fitting it around his arrest, vicious media trial, risks to his physical safety, and court hearings. Some people imagine a thesis as something produced in the comfort of libraries. His was written in the shadow of uncertainty, and the constant knowledge that his freedom is now conditional for life.In the book, Umar looks at the Adivasi communities of Singhbhum during British rule. He argues that they were never a single, unified group, but communities who responded to colonial rule in different ways; that their histories cannot be reduced to one narrative. Reading it now, I find myself thinking that this is true far beyond the history of Adivasi communities. For years, I have seen people reduce my son to whatever version of him suits them. Those who support him often see only one part of him. Those who oppose him see even less. This book, however, asks us to listen, and to allow complexity over binary and certainty.Ramachandra Guha, who wrote the foreword, describes it as one of the finest doctoral dissertations by an Indian scholar that he has read. As Umar’s mother, I felt proud reading this. I wonder if I am proud of him for surviving these years in unlawful incarceration with such grace and courage or I am more proud of him for the words in front of me. No parent expects to measure their child’s achievements against the passing years of incarceration. Yet that is what these years have become.AdvertisementIt makes me sad that Umar cannot step into a bookshop and see his own book. He cannot attend its launch or speak to its readers. But I am also happy to see that the book has begun its own journey. It can travel freely in ways its author cannot. I do not know what it means for a democracy when a man’s scholarship can be published, praised, and read widely while the state that holds him has still not managed, after six years, to bring the case against him to trial. The waiting itself has become the punishment, regardless of what a court eventually decides.Not long ago, the Delhi High Court granted bail to a Kashmiri human rights activist, Parvez Khurram, who had spent four-and-a-half years in prison under the UAPA. The court said that the long period spent in custody, and the fact that his trial was unlikely to end soon, were important reasons to grant him bail. The bench was headed by the same judge who, only a few months earlier, had refused Umar bail. By then, Umar had already spent five years in prison without trial. Sharjeel Imam had spent even longer. In that order, the court said that the delay in trial was not enough to justify bail. How can the same law, before the same judge, lead to such different conclusions?you may likeThe Supreme Court’s own benches have disagreed with each other on this. One judgment questioned how a later ruling could be allowed to override the precedent set by KA Najeeb, which had held that when a person has already spent years in custody with no trial in sight, the harsher provisions of the UAPA ought to give way, and the constitutional promise of liberty should take precedence. For those watching from outside, these may appear to be legal questions. For families like ours, they are measured in parents who grow frailer with every passing year, sisters who have celebrated one festival after another without their brother, nieces and nephews who have grown from toddlers into schoolchildren without ever knowing what it is like to have their uncle at home, and years that cannot be returned.I have come to believe that a democracy is judged not only by the laws it makes, but by how it treats those who live under them. It is judged by whether people are given a fair chance to defend themselves, by how long they are made to wait, and whether justice can still be served before a life has passed by.If you choose to read Fractured Communities, read it not only because its author is in prison, but because it is a serious work of scholarship. The conversation it begins about history, power and the lives of people we simplify too easily is enough for you to ask what kind of power structure keeps the author in jail for years without trial. Perhaps, in reading it, you may also come a little closer to the person who has so long been spoken about, by others in the ways they perceive him. By reading his book, you will get to listen to him in his own voice.The writer is an entrepreneur