Robin Verma is just the kind of name that is bound to stoke suspicion in India, where the society reduces every individual to a sum of his or her caste and religious identities, to second-guess his or her choices. For most of his adult life, Robin Verma, the 34-year-old social activist and assistant professor at Shia PG College Lucknow has been asked to explicitly spell out his identity.

"Robin?" That familiar question was posed to him by one of the five plainclothes policemen at the Hazratganj police station, where they had taken him and Omar Rashid, the Lucknow correspondent of The Hindu newspaper, after picking them up at a restaurant on the evening of December 20. The police wanted to investigate their role in the previous day's protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act at Parivartan Chowk. Verma had left the protest venue when masked men pelted stones, a vehicle was set on fire, and a person died of bullet injuries. The masked men's identity remains a mystery.