The Jammu and Kashmir High Court has quashed the detention order against Kashmir Walla editor Fahad Shah, observing that in the earlier order, the authority used expressions such as “public order” and “security of the state” with a “wavering mind”.

On April 13, the bench led by Justice Wasim Sadiq Nargal concluded that the detaining authority had “not applied its mind while passing the order of detention” and “the detention order has no basis”.

Shah was arrested in February last year on various terrorism charges. Despite securing bail twice, he was rearrested by the J&K police and eventually booked under the Public Safety Act, which allows imprisonment without a trial for up to a year.

The high court quashed his detention under the PSA while hearing a plea filed by Shah’s brother. According to LiveLaw, the plea described Shah as a “reputed journalist having earned a good name and fame on international level in the field of honest and fair journalism”. It also said Shah was “peace loving”, had no criminal record, and that the grounds for his detention were “baseless, unfounded, vague and without any substance”.

The court observed that the maintenance of public order and security and sovereignty of the country are two distinct expressions and cannot be used simultaneously. A mere apprehension of a breach of law and order is not sufficient to meet the accusations of affecting public order. 

“In this case, the apprehension of a disturbance to public order owing to a crime that was reported over seven months prior to the detention order has no basis in fact,” Justice Nargal observed.

Shah was first arrested in Pulwama on February 4, 2022 for purportedly sharing “anti-national” content on social media. In March, he was booked under the Public Safety Act.

In October, the Jammu and Kashmir state investigation agency filed a chargesheet against Shah and research scholar Abdul Aala Fazili in a case of “narrative terrorism”, referring to a report filed by Fazili for Shah’s website 11 years ago. In December, he was granted bail in two cases by an NIA court.

Read this report in Newslaundry on how Shah’s arrest reveals a strange pattern in how Kashmir journalists are targeted.

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