In a master’s classroom at Delhi University, cramped with over a hundred bodies, one hundred different versions of similarly lived lives, anonymity comes easy. Easier still—one can vanish. I first came to know Professor Hany Babu as the man who refused that ease. He began with our names. By passing a blank white sheet from hand to hand, he attached voices to faces. The very simple act of taking attendance in that space became an ethical gesture of seeing, naming, and remembering the students in his class. “It’s how I remember the faces I’m meant to see every week,” he told us. Hany Babu did not like forgetting. Neither do I. And this is where his story begins for me—with names kept in the mouth, a stubborn insistence against erasure.

Hany Babu taught linguistics classes in the mornings. By 09:00 the room was full (at Delhi University that means something); but what I remember most about him is how he practised care as politics. Several times during my time at the university, we were moved to press the administration, and it was Professor Babu who stood with us. It was counsel first, and statement next. Later, when we joined the protests against India’s discriminatory citizenship amendment act, and Delhi witnessed its worst form of communal violence in decades, we chose to boycott classes. He backed the boycott and called off his own. When a right-wing media outlet came for my friend and me, he was my first call for ethics, for law, but most importantly for steadiness. He taught us to live with conscience and to keep each other safe, even when the risk did not blink.

On 28 July, 2020, India’s national investigation agency arrested him under the controversial Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 in connection with the 2018 Elgar Parishad/Bhima Koregaon case. Months have now stacked into years. More than half a decade later, while I have moved countries, found community, learnt a new language, and celebrated milestones, Professor Babu continues to write (and teach) from the same blank cell at Taloja Central Jail. The calendar moves, the case inches on, bail is denied, and trial deferred as the country learns how delay hardens into policy. In early October 2025, the Bombay High Court heard his fresh plea and reserved its order. The prosecution has argued that: “prolonged incarceration cannot be grounds for release.” Is innocence?

Professor Babu’s charges (not even framed as of yet) make bail the exception and delay the rule. What has been offered up as evidence is a digital trail that independent forensic analysts have shown to be polluted. A report by digital forensics firm, Arsenal Consulting, found that incriminating files were planted on the devices of several co-accused in this very prosecution. And when evidence itself is tainted, doubt is not indulgence—it becomes due process.

To reduce him to a case number is to miss the point. Hany Babu is a linguist, an anti-caste scholar, a mentor to the willing, and an associate professor who kept widening the doorway so more of us could walk through. One day I met him on the Delhi metro after a raid on his home in 2019. He said he wasn’t worried for himself as much as for the country. “It’s a dangerous trend,” he told me. He was right. Dissent, in India, has been pushed into private rooms—we turn our phones off, we measure words before uttering them. But Professor Babu kept bringing dissent back into the open. He refused the ease of forgetting. Remembering for him was an ethical act, a political gesture, a form of care. In a space that insists on forgetting, naming is work we do for one another, because even a roll call can be political, and politics is sometimes the beginning of repair. So let’s remember Hany Babu’s name. Pass the sheet around. Add yours. And unmute.