By Nikita Jain
The Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed the preventive detention of a scholar, Shafat Maqbool Wani, booked under the Public Safety Act (PSA), 1978, for possessing literature banned by the administration.
The court said in its order that mere possession of books with “dispiriting titles” does not by itself make a person a criminal to be booked under the stringent law. The observation came a year after the J&K administration banned 25 books, most of which are on Kashmir’s history.
Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi, while hearing a petition on September 3, directed the authorities to release the detainee, Wani, immediately. The petition was filed on Wani’s behalf by his uncle.
Wani, a scholar from Kupwara, was detained under the PSA last year. The detention order cited his father’s former militant links, his invitations to international academic conferences, books found in his possession and an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, case in which he was granted bail.
“It also needs to be emphasised here that the respondents have not shown any subversive activity against the name of petitioner, which compelled them to take recourse to preventive detention,” Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi said in her order last week.
Police had claimed that the books titled Construction of an Islamic Order in Hindutva Reimagination and The Saffronisation of Occupied Kashmir: Demystifying Hindutva Settlers, Colonial Designers were seized from Wani’s house. They had alleged that the seized literature promoted separatist ideology.
On August 5, 2025, the J&K Home Department banned the publication and circulation of 25 books about Kashmir. The administration alleged that those books promoted a “false narrative” and “secessionism” in the region. The order was issued on the sixth anniversary of the reading down of Article 370.
Intellectuals in Kashmir have raised concerns over the deteriorating and shrinking academic spaces in the region.
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here.
