‘Khalid even questioned god’

Arrested JNU scholar Umar Khalid’s sister says her brother has wrongly been branded an Islamist terrorist because the self-proclaimed Marxist has a habit of questioning everything, including the existence of god.

Khalid, facing the charge of sedition, surrendered before Delhi Police shortly after midnight and was taken into custody. 

His family is less worried about their son now after he made a dramatic appearance at the JNU campus on Sunday night, days after he went into hiding following a police crackdown. His sister, Kulsum Fatima, 25, a post-graduate in history from Ambedkar University, praised her ‘bhai’ — as she fondly calls Khalid — as a “good human being” who has done nothing wrong. “He has always been a Marxist. He never believed in the Allah. Despite our family being very religious, he chose to be a non-believer, because he also questioned God,” Fatima said at her South Delhi residence in a dingy neighbourhood of Zakir Nagar.