This is The Guardian.

Hi, my name is David Wolf and I'm the editor of The Guardian Long Read.

This summer we're picking a few of our favourite audio long reads of the year so far

and telling you a little bit about the background of the piece at the start of each episode.

So the piece I picked today is called The Trials of an Indian Witness,

how a Muslim man was caught in a legal nightmare and it's by Rahul Batia. We published it in March.

In January 2021, I got an email from one of our regular writers and Indian journalists

called Rahul Batia. He said, I'd like to write about the role India's courts are playing

as violence and authoritarianism take root. We talked a little bit about the idea

at the time but we couldn't find the right story to bring this idea to life.

Then a year later I got another email from Rahul, he said he'd found a story.

He wrote a Muslim man who witnessed right-wing mobs kill Muslims and then escaped when they set his

home on fire has spent two years being summoned to police stations across Delhi to give his

testimony. Judges call him to court, ask him to explain what he saw and are replaced by new judges

who ask him the same things. Policemen miss his testimony so that the names of his attackers

aren't recorded. Families of suspects have threatened to kill him and he keeps getting calls to

take money in exchange for turning hostile. All through it he keeps going back over and over,

convinced that if he doesn't do this he has no right to expect anyone else to do the right thing.

By the point that Rahul sent me that email he'd already met with the man whose name is Nissa

708 times and his plan was to keep following him over the course of the year.

So it seemed obvious that this was a great idea for a piece, one that would show through the story

of this single individual the way India is changing under Narendra Modi. So Rahul went away

...