A legal case is supposed to move towards an answer: guilt or acquittal, conviction or release, liability or vindication. When that movement stretches across years, the process begins to acquire a significance of its own, with hearings becoming milestones, adjournments becoming part of daily life, and detention can continue while the central question remains unresolved. The law may still distinguish between an accused person and a convicted prisoner, but the experience of prolonged confinement can make that distinction increasingly difficult to sustain in practice.
The cases of Umar Khalid in India and Imran Khan in Pakistan show two different forms of this problem. Khalid has remained in custody since September 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), accused of helping plan the February 2020 Delhi riots, with his trial yet to begin. Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, has faced a succession of cases since his arrest in August 2023, with convictions in some matters and other proceedings continuing through the courts. Their political backgrounds, allegations and legal circumstances are different and should not be collapsed into a single narrative. What connects them is the length and accumulation of legal proceedings, and the question this raises about the point at which procedure itself begins to impose a punishment.
The public response to prolonged detention often focuses on endurance. Prisoners who continue to write, organise, speak through lawyers, or maintain political activity while in confinement are described as resilient. There is value in recognising endurance, but resilience can also shift attention away from a more basic institutional question as to what happens when a legal process continues for so long that waiting becomes one of its most consequential effects. That question extends beyond these two high-profile cases. Around the world, millions of people remain in custody while their cases await trial or resolution. The issue is therefore larger than the politics surrounding any individual prisoner. It concerns the relationship between due process, personal liberty and the state’s responsibility to bring legal proceedings to a timely conclusion.
This is not an attempt to decide whether either man is guilty, innocent, or to treat their situations as identical. It instead looks at a pattern that appears whenever someone spends years caught in a legal system without resolution, and at how we talk about such people as resilient and unbroken. That language is not wrong, but it can quietly leave the process itself unexamined, a pattern that extends far beyond these two cases.
The Politics of Resilience
The word “resilience” did not originate in politics. The ecologist C.S. Holling coined it in 1973 to describe how natural systems absorb shocks and keep functioning; the idea later spread into disaster relief, development policy, and human psychology. Scholars such as Brad Evans and Julian Reid note the catch with this borrowing. An ecosystem cannot object to the flood that tests it, but a person facing an unjust process can. Praising someone’s resilience without asking whether the conditions producing it are fair quietly treats a political problem as a natural one, something to be weathered rather than fixed. The theorist Claudia Aradau points out that the language of resilience teaches us to treat human beings as subjects who must continually adjust to constant shocks and systemic breakdown, rather than expecting those systems to be fixed.
This does not make resilience a hollow word. A person can hold on to their sense of self while still opposing their situation; adapting to something and accepting it are not the same act. The trouble starts only when adaptation becomes the whole story, and when coping is read as proof that the system testing someone is bearable and does not need to change. The same pattern occurs wherever hardship is prolonged, from refugees praised for resourcefulness in temporary camps to patients called “fighters” in ways that shift the burden of a broken healthcare system onto their individual attitude. Prolonged legal detention is simply another setting where this happens, and it is inherently one of the more fixable ones, since a legal process is a human decision, not a natural disaster.
When Process Becomes Punishment
Legally, being investigated or tried is not the same as being punished. But legal scholar Malcolm Feeley demonstrated in 1979 that even when a court never convicts someone, or convicts them only after years of appeals, the process of being tried and re-tried can itself become the penalty. Feeley wrote about local U.S. courts, but the principle is universal: a legal system need not formally punish someone for that person to experience years of custody and legal costs as punishment in every practical way.
Khalid’s case shows one version of this. Section 43D (5) of the UAPA bars bail whenever a court believes there are reasonable grounds to believe that the accusation is prima facie true, a low bar for the prosecution and a high one for the accused. He has now spent nearly six years waiting for a trial that has not begun. In May 2026, the Supreme Court referred the underlying constitutional question of how personal liberty should weigh against a law designed to make bail difficult to a larger bench, where it remains unresolved.
Khan’s case shows a related yet different version. He has been convicted and sentenced in some cases, including a corruption case that drew a 14-year term and a later sentence for state gifts, while remaining entangled in more than 100 other unresolved cases. Some convictions have since been suspended or overturned on appeal. The effect is not a single long wait for a verdict, as with Khalid, but more like a treadmill: each time one case is resolved, another stays open. As a result, years in custody, restricted family access, and reported health complications persist regardless of any single courtroom outcome. Where Khalid’s ordeal is the length of one unfinished process, Khan’s is the accumulation of many that never quite finish.
The two men could hardly be less alike in background. One is an activist who built a public profile through the Left’s protest politics; the other is a former international cricketer and prime minister with a mass political following. Their politics sit at opposite ends of the spectrum, and their supporters would likely reject any comparison between them. However, the comparison here is between the mechanisms holding them. The fact that a similar mechanism appears in two very different political systems against two very different public figures suggests that “process as punishment” is not a feature of one ideology or one country’s courts, but of how state power works whenever a legal process runs without a firm deadline.
The Resilient Prisoner, Twice Over
Sociologist Erving Goffman described prisons as “total institutions”, that is, places built to reshape a person’s entire daily rhythm, from what they eat to who they speak to and when. Much of the coverage of both men has focused on how they resist that reshaping. For Khalid, it is through reading and writing from inside a cell, while for Khan, it is through defiance in court appearances and accounts of deteriorating health that supporters read as evidence of unbroken resolve. Both narratives matter because they refuse to let either man be reduced to a case number. Yet, resistance to a total institution also reveals how total the institution is; the discipline required to keep writing is also a detail about everything the institution is trying to take away.
There is also a scale problem that an individual story cannot show. Both men are unusually visible figures, one through an activist and academic network, the other through a mass political party. Most people in prolonged pre-trial detention have none of that, neither public petitions nor a private lawyer for every hearing. If two men with this much public support can still spend years without a case being resolved, it reveals the harsh reality of what quietly happens to people with far less visibility.
From a neutral perspective, the state’s stated interests are to investigate serious allegations in Khalid’s case and corruption in Khan’s case; neither claim is inherently in bad faith, and procedural delay does not automatically render a case baseless. But a delay of this length is a structural flaw in the system, not a fact about the person inside it.
A Global Pattern?
Khalid and Khan are not exceptions inside otherwise well-functioning systems; they are visible instances of a global trend. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that of roughly 11.5 million people held in prisons worldwide, over 30 per cent (some 3.6 million) are awaiting trial rather than serving a sentence. In parts of Southern Asia, unsentenced prisoners now make up close to two-thirds of the total prison population, a share that has risen for a decade. Both men’s detentions have drawn rulings from the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which declared Khan’s imprisonment unlawful in 2024 and Khalid’s in 2026; neither government substantively responded.
The harm extends well beyond the individuals involved. Prolonged pre-trial detention drives prison overcrowding, straining living conditions for everyone held in the system. Because it falls hardest on those who cannot afford bail or private representation, the presumption of innocence effectively depends on income. Furthermore, each case that drags on without accountability quietly normalises the practice for the next. Seen this way, Khalid’s and Khan’s cases are not just about two men enduring detention; they are local examples of a global weakness, that is, legal processes that no institution is currently required to bring to a timely end.
Beyond Endurance
None of this argues that resilience should no longer be noticed. Both men’s ability to hold on to a sense of purpose under years of confinement demonstrates genuine human endurance. But noticing this should not be where the conversation ends, because merely admiring how well someone copes can quietly obscure the process that holds them.
The presumption of innocence and, in Khan’s case, the right to appeal without indefinite delay are meant to mean that years spent in a legal process are meaningfully different from a settled sentence. That distinction evaporates the longer the process runs, even while its status never changes on paper. A person can be presumed innocent or have an active appeal and still lose years of ordinary life while waiting to find out what either promise is worth.
Cases like these will keep returning to courtrooms in South Asia and elsewhere. Another hearing, another plea, and another account of a person who has not stopped enduring. That endurance is real and deserves recognition. But it is not an answer to the question their detention raises, nor does it answer for the millions of less visible people waiting alongside them worldwide. The essential question is not how much longer a person can endure a process without breaking. It is how much longer that process should be allowed to run before it is required to answer the question it was meant to settle in the first place.
