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Gulfisha Fatima was arrested on April 9, 2020, in the aftermath of the anti-CAA protests, and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). She is the only woman among the accused in the Delhi riots conspiracy case who still remains in prison. Over the years, many others have secured bail. But for Gulfisha, the legal process has become its own form of punishment – hearings delayed, adjourned or derailed altogether by procedural lapses and judicial transfers.

It has now been more than five years. She has not been convicted of any crime. And yet, her incarceration endures – not as a sentence handed down by a court, but as an unending wait, sustained by a trial that never arrives.

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Gulfisha Fatima has now been imprisoned for over 1,900 days.

This year, on the fifth anniversary of her incarceration, a solidarity week was organised for her. Artists created posters. Writers wrote essays. We shared her story again, in public and private spaces, hoping that her name does not disappear under the weight of silence.

I mailed her a letter with the printed posters created in solidarity with her by a few artists – drawings that said ‘Free Gulfisha’. Not as a campaign or a legal demand, but a gesture of care. The kind of solidarity that says: you are not forgotten, and they haven’t succeeded in making us forget.

But the prison did not deliver the letter. The posters, it seems, were “unacceptable.” Too political, or perhaps too hopeful.

What is the state afraid of? Posters, apparently.

This wasn’t the first time something in my letters had been censored. I remember the first one I received from Gul – whole phrases had been erased with a white marker. I couldn’t make sense of what she was trying to say, or who she was referring to. Later, a friend explained that whenever the jail authorities find something objectionable, they simply blot it out with correction fluid.

What were the words being erased with whitener? Underneath those erased spaces were stories from Gul’s PadhoPadhao program – narratives about how, despite describing herself as impatient, she had become the teacher her mother always said she would be. These were letters tracing how incarceration had begun to reshape her: how she was being pushed into roles she had never imagined or wanted for herself – teaching, learning to make jewellery, sitting still for hours, enduring solitary confinement for days on........

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