Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi mentioned that mere possession of books with “dispiriting titles” and authored by another person will not be adequate to invoke preventive detention legal guidelines, notably when the authorities fail to exhibit any particular subversive or prejudicial exercise attributable to the individuals.
The Court docket made the commentary whereas quashing a preventive detention order issued below the Jammu & Kashmir Public Security Act towards educational scholar Shafat Maqbool Wani, who had been detained on the idea of allegations of involvement in anti-national actions and possession of alleged anti-national literature.
These included books titled “Development of an Islamic Order in Hindutva Reimagination” and “The Saffronization of Occupied Kashmir, Demystifying Hindutva Settlers, Colonial Designers.”
“The alleged anti-national literature proven to have been seized from the detenue has additionally presumably weighed with the respondents to model the detenue as an anti-national, nevertheless, the mentioned literature has wrongly been attributed to the detenue having been authored by him. The discovered counsel for the petitioner is kind of justified in submitting that the petitioner, being a tutorial scholar, is predicted to be in possession of number of literary means, subsequently, a mere possession of the books with dispiriting titles doesn’t ipso facto make the petitioner/ detenue a prison towards whom the preventive detention was required to be invoked,” the Court docket noticed.
Pertinently, the Court docket additionally mentioned that the daddy of the dentenue being an ex-militant can’t be a purpose to imagine that the son may need been inculcated with the identical separatist ideology, and such an assertion was “delusory”.
