From sedition cases and Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) detentions to bulldozed homes and endless trials, the past decade shows how incarceration and coercion have become tools to govern dissent and discipline minorities, with Umar Khalid’s case marking not an exception, but a pattern.I don’t defend Umar Khalid because I agree with him; I defend him because a system that can jail someone for years without trial has already crossed a constitutional line.But Khalid’s incarceration is not an exception. It is part of a governing pattern that has taken shape over the past decade, one where imprisonment, demolition, and legal delay are used to discipline dissent and manage minorities, especially Muslims, outside the terrain of politics.Since 2014, the Indian State has steadily expanded the use of coercive law to redraw the limits of citizenship. Sedition cases against Kashmiri students for cheering a cricket match, the arrests of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students in 2016, and the revival of colonial offences marked an early shift. These cases were rarely about convictions. They were about warning.By the late 2010s, the UAPA became the centrepiece of this approach. Its stringent bail provisions and prolonged investigation timelines made incarceration itself the punishment. Detention no longer followed trial; it replaced it. Liberty was suspended first, examined later.This shift intensified after 2019. Protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), mobilisation by Muslim students, and criticism of majoritarian politics were increasingly framed as threats to national security. Activists like Sharjeel Imam were jailed for years without trial. Journalist Siddique Kappan was arrested while travelling to report on violence. Kashmiri politicians such as Waheed Para faced repeated detentions even while participating in electoral processes.Umar Khalid’s arrest in September 2020 sits squarely within this landscape. So do the prolonged incarcerations of student activists, lawyers, researchers, and writers booked under UAPA for speeches, associations, or presence at protests. The pattern is clear: dissent is not debated; it is contained.Alongside incarceration, another instrument emerged, bulldozing. In Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and elsewhere, homes and shops of accused persons, often Muslims, were demolished soon after protests or arrests. No trial, no conviction only spectacle. Property destruction became instant punishment, collapsing the distance between accusation and penalty.What unites prison cells and bulldozers is not law, but message. The State signals that dissent will not only be prosecuted but erased physically, socially, economically. This is governance through fear, not consent.Political imprisonment does more than silence individuals; it weakens representation itself, replacing voices rooted in community histories with leaders shaped by distance and fear. Sedition and security laws turn complex political grievances into technocratic problems to be managed, sidelining communities formed through decades of dependence, neglect, and mistrust.The consequences for political representation are severe. When voices rooted in lived community histories are removed from public life for years, politics empties out. Decisions are taken about communities without those communities being heard. Representation gives way to administration.This affects Muslims and marginalised groups most sharply. Already shaped by surveillance, exclusion, and institutional distrust, they now see participation itself as risk. When students, journalists, and organisers disappear into jails without trial, silence becomes rational. Alienation deepens.Legal reasoning enables this erosion. Courts are asked to presume prosecution claims at the bail stage, deferring scrutiny to distant trials. Habeas corpus exists as procedure, not protection. A right that cannot secure release ceases to restrain power. Media narratives have helped normalise this condition. Television studios declare guilt before courts examine evidence. Universities are branded anti-national. Protest sites become crime scenes. Even when allegations unravel, incarceration and demolition continue. Suspicion hardens into common sense.The government insists that reforms have resolved older conflicts. But governance cannot erase memory. Communities remember encounters, demolitions, custodial deaths, and years of neglect. When the State responds to this memory with cages and bulldozers rather than dialogue, trust collapses.Defending liberty in these cases is not about endorsing ideas. It is about resisting a model of rule that governs through punishment. A democracy cannot survive when dissent is managed by incarceration and minority life is regulated through fear.Ask yourself this: what remains of politics when disagreement leads not to debate, but to jail or demolition? What kind of citizenship survives when liberty depends on convenience rather than proof?Indian democracy will not collapse with one verdict. It will erode quietly, through prolonged detentions, delayed trials, destroyed homes, and a public taught to accept absence. Elections will continue. Institutions will function. But political life will thin.For Muslims, minorities, and those who challenge the establishment, governance increasingly arrives through suspicion rather than dialogue. When the State treats dissent as danger, trust collapses. Democracy cannot be understood only through verdicts or events, but through the long memory of communities who remember what reforms claimed to erase. When memory is ignored, coercion fills the gap, and politics withers into control.Today it is Umar Khalid. Yesterday it was students, journalists, and protesters. Tomorrow it will be someone else the State finds inconvenient. The question is no longer about individual guilt. It is about whether liberty still limits power, or whether power now governs through prison and rubble.Nirmanyu Chouhan is a researcher of politics and society.