After spending 20 months in jail in preventive detention under Jammu and Kashmir’s Public Safety Act (PSA), Zahid Ali, a 67-year-old lawyer and the former spokesperson of the banned Jamaat-e-Islami, was released from Kathua district jail in Jammu on 2 May 2024.

Justice Rahul Bharti of the J&K High Court, in his order pronounced on 3 April 2024, declared his detention illegal and, in a first-ever, ordered the state to pay compensation of five lakh rupees. The PSA allows a detention of up to two years without a trial.

On 2 April, the same judge ordered the state to pay compensation of Rs 2 lakh to Aftab Hussain, a 22-year-old student, after finding his detention under the PSA to be illegal and unconstitutional.

The detention order against Ali, issued by the district magistrate of Pulwama in south Kashmir on 14 September 2022, said that Ali was a threat to state security, organising “anti-national rallies” to advance cessation of J&K from India and merger with Pakistan, and working for the restoration of J&K’s autonomy, revoked on 5 August 2019, three months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to its second consecutive victory in May 2019.

The judge noted that the district magistrate seemed unaware that three previous preventive detention orders against the petitioner were quashed.

Ali’s release was similar to cases of at least three Kashmiri journalists who were rearrested despite courts dismissing cases or detention orders against them (see Article 14’s reporting here, here and here). This technique has now spread beyond J&K and was most recently used against Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Kejriwal was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation while in jail on 26 June 2024, a week after a Delhi court had released him on bail in the liquor policy case on 20 June. The Delhi High Court put his bail on hold on 25 June.




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