At 12.48 pm on May 13, 2025, Abdul Wahid Shaikh stood at the threshold of academic triumph. After years of struggle, the 47-year-old school teacher was finally submitting his PhD thesis on “prison literature” at Mahatma Gandhi Mission University in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. A man who had spent nine years wrongfully imprisoned was now completing his doctoral work on the very subject that had defined his existence.
