4 min readSrinagarUpdated: Sep 10, 2026 04:28 AM IST
Mere possession of books with dispiriting titles doesn’t make a person a criminal, the Jammu, Kashmir & Ladakh High Court said, as it quashed the Public Safety Act (PSA) charges against a north Kashmir scholar. The observation came a year after the J&K administration banned 25 books — most of them on Kashmir history.
Shafat Maqbool Wani, a scholar from Kupwara, was detained under the Public Safety Act (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.
The petitioners, the order said, have challenged the detention on the ground that, barring the UAPA case, the detaining authority had failed to mention any specific activity that was prejudicial to the state.
“Although the respondents have reflected in the counter affidavit as also in the grounds of detention that the detenue had been granted bail, therefore, they have not been oblivious to this fact. However, at the same time, it can very safely be said that the detaining authority does not appear to have made any effort to derive satisfaction as regards the prejudicial activity of the petitioner/ detenue warranting his preventive detention,” the order reads. “Thus, the contention of the learned counsel for the petitioner that there has been non-application of mind on the part of the detaining authority in detaining the detenue, carries substance”.
In its reasons for the preventive detention, the J&K police had cited the “separatist” ideology of Wani’s father and his invitations to international academic conferences. “(He) has been brought up in a family having separatist ideology and as such, the anti-India and separatist feelings have got inculcated in the detenue since childhood. His father was an ex-militant affiliated with terrorist organisation Al-Barq, who has surrendered in the year 1990,” the police said in its detention order.
“It is also stated in the grounds of detention that the detenue had received many invitations for attending international conferences, viz. Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Graduate Students Conference at Columbia University and the Eighth Annual South Asia Conference at Dublin City University”.
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The grounds of detention further stated that “anti-national” literature was seized from Wani’s possession and included a book authored by the petitioner.
“The alleged anti-national literature shown to have been seized from the detenue has also presumably weighed with the respondents to brand the detenue as an anti-national. However, the said literature has wrongly been attributed to the detenue as having been authored by him,” the court said. “The learned counsel for the petitioner is quite justified in submitting that the petitioner, being an academic scholar, is expected to be in possession of a variety of literary means. Therefore, a mere possession of the books with dispiriting titles does not ipso facto make the petitioner/ detenue a criminal against whom the preventive detention was required to be invoked.”
In August last year, J-K administration banned 25 books as “promoting secessionist sentiment and false narratives”. This year, the government asked all the government and private schools, colleges, universities, coaching centres and public libraries to screen all books and journals for “inappropriate or objectionable content”.
