The Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court has quashed another preventive detention under the Public Safety Act, ruling that there was “no application of mind” by the Bandipora senior superintendent of police and the district magistrate in detaining the petitioner, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.
It said that there was instead “a unity of mind that the petitioner needs to be detained on one false pretext or another”.
The Public Safety Act is a preventive detention law that allows persons to be taken into custody to prevent them from acting against “the security of the state or the maintenance of the public order” in the Union Territory.
Justice Rahul Bharti directed that Ehtsham ul Haq Dar be released from custody if he is not required in any other case, the newspaper reported. Dar had been detained under the Public Safety Act on May 6, following an order by the Bandipora district magistrate, and was held in Kishtwar jail.
The Public Safety Act Advisory Board, in an order dated June 2, found sufficient cause for his detention. The government had extended his detention until November 5.
Bharti noted that there was no record of any further extension of the petitioner’s detention. He added that the grounds for preventive detention were based on “vague and conjectured assumptions without any…factual content”, except a criminal case relating to a first information report, the newspaper reported.
The judge observed that the authorities had acted “unmindful of the constitutional obligation of resorting to preventive detention with due caution and circumspection”, The Indian Express reported.
Bharti added that according to the dossier Dar was allegedly involved in “anti-national activities” as an overground worker of a banned terrorist organisation.
He also noted that the police dossier and the grounds of detention were “exact replicas” of each other.
Bharti said that by “literally lifting the print and text of the dossier, the district magistrate, Bandipora, purportedly formulated the so-called grounds of detention more as a mouthpiece of the senior superintendent of police, Bandipora, and passed the detention order”.
“A fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India is not so fragile and weak-footed that by purported reference to any casual exercise at the end of the authorities under the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978, the said fundamental right of the petitioner can be uprooted,” The Indian Express quoted the judge as observing.
Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty.
Last week, Bharti had also ordered the release of another detainee, Mudasir Ahmad Bhat, from Udhampur district jail, holding that his preventive detention was inconsistent with constitutional safeguards governing such powers.
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