IIOJK HC slams guilt by book cover, frees scholar detained under draconian PSA
Court quashes 4 other PSAs, orders release of detenues
Srinagar: In a scathing indictment of misuse of the draconian Public Safety Act, the High Court of Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir has quashed the detention of a young Kashmiri academic and ruled that books on his shelf cannot be treated as proof of a crime.
According to Kashmir Media Service, Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi ordered immediate release of Shafat Maqbool Wani alias Shaf, a resident of Kukroosa village in Handwara, Kupwara, who was booked under detention order No. 27-DMK/PSA of 2025 by the District Magistrate Kupwara on the charge that his books and his bloodline made him a threat to “Indian security”.
Wani, a graduate student who had received invitations to present papers at Columbia University and Dublin City University, had already been cleared by a special NIA court in Jammu. On September 8, 2025, the NIA judge rejected the agency’s plea to extend his remand beyond 155 days, and five days later granted him bail in the case registered at Handwara police station.
Within hours of the bail order, the Kupwara administration invoked the PSA to keep him behind bars under a law meant for preventing future harm rather than punishing a proven offence. The grounds of detention leaned heavily on genealogy and scholarship. The administration claimed his father had once belonged to Al-Barq before surrendering in 1990 and therefore “anti-India feeling had settled into the son since childhood”.
It also cited literature seized from him, including a book authored by him titled “Construction of an Islamic Order in Hindutva Reimagination”. The detention came a year after the IIOJK administration banned 25 books in August 2025, mostly on Kashmir’s history
The court held that Wani’s file met almost none of it. The claim that pro-freedom ideology had taken root in him because of his father’s past was termed an “illusion” and an “unmindful use of power”. The court noted that part of the literature was wrongly attributed to him and even where authorship was genuine, a scholar is expected to hold a range of material, some of it discomforting.
“Owning books with grim titles does not make their owner a criminal,” the court ruled, quashing the detention order and directing immediate release and return of the detention record.
In another judgment, the High Court quashed four detention orders passed under the black law Public Safety Act and directed the authorities to release the detenues. Justice M A Chowdhary quashed the PSAs of Ishfaq Ahmad Wani of Srigufwara, Islamabad, Firdous Ahmad Dar of Bijbehara, Islamabad, and Showkat Ahmad Bhat of Qalamabad, Kupwara, while Justice Sanjay Dhar quashed the PSA of Faizan Yaseen Shalla of Srinagar.
They were detained by the concerned District Magistrates on 29-04-2025, 25-06-2022, 30-04-2025 and 07-05-2025 on the pretext of preventing them from indulging in “activities prejudicial to the security of the state”. The court observed that the impugned detention orders suffer from non-application of mind, reliance upon stale antecedents and failure to consider vital intervening circumstances, and directed their forthwith release if not required in any other case.
