23 October 2026 | The Middle East Eye
On 3 September, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in Indian-administered Kashmir quashed the preventive detention order of research scholar Shafat Maqbool Wani, ruling that owning books with controversial titles does not make a person a criminal or justify detention without trial.
Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi said in her order that “owning books with grim titles does not make their owner a criminal”.
She held that authorities had failed to establish any specific subversive activity warranting Wani’s detention under the Public Safety Act (PSA), which allows administrative preventive detention without trial for up to two years.
Wani, a resident of north Kashmir’s Kupwara district, was initially arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), an anti-terrorism law. A special National Investigation Agency court in Jammu later granted him bail.
On 13 September 2025, the same day he secured bail in the UAPA case, the Kupwara district magistrate ordered his detention under the PSA, citing concerns that his activities could be “detrimental to state security”.