Out in cold after criticising Govt, Shah Faesal is back in IAS

Notably, Faesal’s resignationhad never been accepted by the government and he even withdrew it later.

Sources said the matter had been pending with the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) since then. “His file was sent to the Ministry of Home Affairs recently to take a decision as the matter involved Jammu and Kashmir which is the MHA’s domain,” an official said.

On Thursday, in a series of tweets, Faesal spoke about “another chance” and being “excited to start all over again”.

“Eight months of my life (Jan 2019-Aug 2019) created so much baggage that I was almost finished. While chasing a chimera, I lost almost everything that I had built over the years. Job. Friends. Reputation. Public goodwill. But I never lost hope. My idealism had let me down,” he tweeted.

“But I had faith in myself. That I would undo the mistakes I had made. That life would give me another chance. A part of me is exhausted with the memory of those 8 months and wants to erase that legacy. Much of it is already gone. Time will mop off the rest…,” he added. “It is always worth giving ourselves another chance. Setbacks make us stronger. And there is an amazing world beyond the shadows of the past. I turn 39 next month. And I’m really excited to start all over again.”

The first Kashmiri to top the civil services exams, Faesal was allotted the home cadre in 2008. A doctor-turned-bureaucrat, Faesal served in many capacities in the state with his last position being Managing Director of Jammu and Kashmir Power Development Corporation (JKPDC). He was selected as an Edward Mason Fellow at John F Kennedy School at Harvard University in June 2018 and was supposed to rejoin government service a year later.

But six months before his return, he surprised everyone when he announced his decision to resign from IAS on January 9, 2019, and hinted at joining politics.

At the time of his resignation, he had tweeted, “To protest the unabated killings in Kashmir and absence of any credible political initiative from Union government, I have decided to resign from IAS. Kashmiri lives matter.”

In March that year, he floated his own political party, the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement (JKPM). Following the August 5, 2019 decisions that stripped the state of its special status, Faesal was prevented from flying to Istanbul from Delhi and subsequently put under detention. He was eventually released in June 2020.

Soon, Faesal announced that he was not only resigning from his party but quitting politics altogether. Sources said Faesal has since then been trying to enter the services again, which the government had looked at sympathetically.

During this time, Faesal deleted all his past tweets that were critical of the Centre and has been praising schemes initiated by the government in Kashmir. He retweets statements, announcements and speeches of PM Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. He even tweeted recently that people must watch Kashmir Files, the Vivek Agnihotri film on the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley.

Among the reasons that the government had not accepted his resignation was that he was being probed for all the “unauthorized” social media posts and statements he had made before and after his resignation from the services.

In an interview to The Indian Express on August 10, 2019, Faesal had called the government decision on Kashmir a “catastrophic turn in our collective history”. He gave multiple interviews where he said that now Kashmiris had no choice but resistance. “I see it as a catastrophic turn in our collective history, a day when everybody is feeling that it is a death knell to our identity, our history, our right to our land, our right to our existence. A new age of indignation has begun from August 5,” he had told The Indian Express.

In 2018, Faesal, who comes from the Lolab valley in Kupwara, courted trouble for a remark on rampant rapes in South Asia. In a tweet, criticising the rape culture in the region, Faesal referred to South Asia as “Rapistan”. Even as an inquiry was opened against him, Faesal refused to withdraw his comment and instead suggested that the inquiry was a classic case of “bureaucratic over-enthusiasm”.