The Public Safety Act: prison without charge or trial

Sent out for vegetables

In September 2016, in the months of mass protest that followed the killing of the young fighter Burhan Wani by Indian forces, Zubair Ahmad Shah was arrested near his home. He was seventeen. “I had left my house to buy vegetables,” he later told Amnesty International. The police dossier gave his age as twenty-two and described him as “a regular stone-pelter”, and on that basis he was detained under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act. Only after a petition to the High Court, with his school-leaving certificate, was he moved to a juvenile home on 9 November 2016. His mother died while he was held. He called her death the “biggest tragedy”, and the detention “a blot on my life forever”.

Zubair was one of many thousands. The Public Safety Act lets the authorities in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir imprison a person for up to two years without charge and without trial, on an official’s order and on the strength of a police file. The government itself disclosed in 2015 that 16,329 people had been detained under it since 1988. Amnesty International, which has documented the law for more than a decade, calls it a “lawless law” and describes its use as a revolving door.

A law against timber smugglers

The Act was introduced in 1978 by the government of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, to be used, it was said, against timber smugglers. The first person detained under it, The Wire reported, was Ghulam Nabi, president of the Kashmir Motor Drivers Association, who had stood against Abdullah in the previous election on a Janata Party ticket. A law presented as a protection for forests was turned at once on a political opponent.

From 1990, as the uprising against Indian rule spread, it became the authorities’ ordinary means of holding Kashmiris whom they could not or would not put on trial. Amnesty International found the detainees to include political leaders and activists, people suspected of supporting the armed groups, lawyers, journalists and protesters, among them children.

What the Act allows

A divisional commissioner or a district magistrate may order a person detained to prevent him from acting against “the security of the State” or “the maintenance of public order”. The maximum term is two years in the first case and one year in the second. No charge is laid and no court hears evidence. The grounds must be given to the detainee within five to ten days, but the authority may withhold any fact it considers against the public interest to disclose.

The order goes before an advisory board appointed by the government, where the detainee may not be represented by a lawyer. Section 22 bars any legal proceeding against officials for what they do in good faith under the Act. The only real remedy is a habeas corpus petition in the High Court. The board almost never says no: between April 2016 and mid-December 2017 the government referred 1,004 orders to it, and it confirmed 998.

The orders are, in practice, written by the police. Using the Right to Information Act, the activist Sheikh Ghulam Rasool established that district magistrates “were only approving the dossiers prepared by the police, without analysing them”.

A lawless law

Amnesty International’s report “A Lawless Law”, published on 21 March 2011, cited estimates of 8,000 to 20,000 people detained under the Act over two decades, with 322 held in the first nine months of 2010 alone. “The Jammu and Kashmir authorities are using PSA detentions as a revolving door to keep people they can’t or won’t convict through proper legal channels locked up and out of the way,” said Sam Zarifi, its Asia-Pacific director. Amnesty asked for the Act to be repealed and for every detainee to be released or charged and fairly tried.

The state amended the Act in April 2012. No one under eighteen could now be detained, and the first period of detention was cut to three months for public order and six for state security, extendable as before. On visits in April and July 2012 Amnesty found at least three cases in which the authorities had detained children by recording their ages as over eighteen; two boys of seventeen had been entered as nineteen. The pro-freedom leader Masarat Alam Bhat had been held under four successive orders between 2010 and 2012. The High Court quashed three of them; each time, a new order followed.

The revolving door

Amnesty’s third report, “Tyranny of a ‘Lawless Law’”, analysed the cases of 210 detainees. The authorities refused to let it be released in Srinagar in June 2019, citing the “prevailing law and order situation”. More than 2,400 people had been detained between 2007 and 2016, the report found, 525 of them in 2016, and the courts had released about six in ten. The UN human rights office separately counted more than 1,000 people detained under the Act between March 2016 and August 2017. Amnesty described detentions of children, orders passed on vague and general grounds, and the use of the Act as a safety net to keep people in prison when the courts granted them bail. Its India head, Aakar Patel, said the Act was “contributing to inflaming tensions between the state authorities and local populace” and should be repealed immediately.

The High Court has found most of these orders unlawful. Between April 2016 and mid-December 2017 it admitted 941 petitions and quashed 764 orders, more than 81 per cent. But a judgment takes months, and a detainee who wins can be detained again on a fresh order the same day.

August 2019

On 5 August 2019 New Delhi stripped Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and split it into two union territories, and it locked up the territory’s political class first. The home ministry told parliament that 5,161 people had been taken into custody; the lists included about 144 minors, drawn up on the Supreme Court’s orders. On 3 February 2021 the minister of state for home affairs, G. Kishan Reddy, said that 613 people had been detained under the Public Safety Act since 1 August 2019, describing them as “separatists, over ground workers, stone pelters etc.”. The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society counted 662 such detentions in 2019, 412 of them after 5 August. Figures reported by The Indian Express, and cited by Kashmir Life, put the total at 699 in 2019, 160 in 2020 and 95 in the first seven months of 2021.

Three former chief ministers were among the detained. Farooq Abdullah, a sitting member of India’s parliament, was placed under the Act in September 2019. His son Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti had been in custody since 5 August under a provision of the criminal procedure code that allowed six months of preventive detention. On the night of 6 February 2020, hours before that period ran out, both were placed under the Public Safety Act, together with Ali Mohammad Sagar of the National Conference and Sartaj Madni of the Peoples Democratic Party.

The dossiers showed what the state feared. Omar Abdullah’s accused him of being “able to convince his electorate to come out and vote in huge numbers even during peak of militancy” and of “instigating people on Twitter against the unity and integrity of the Nation”. Mehbooba Mufti’s, Kashmir Reader reported, cited remarks challenging Kashmir’s accession to India if Article 370 were abrogated. Her daughter, Iltija Mufti, called it an “Orwellian dystopia”.

Prisons far from home

In July 2018 the government had amended the Act so that detainees could be held in jails outside Jammu and Kashmir. A Home Department record reported by Kashmir Life shows 1,122 people transferred to prisons outside the territory between 2018 and August 2023: 295 in 2019, 146 in 2021 and 585 in 2022. In August 2023, 408 were still held outside, 29 of them foreign nationals.

Kashmir Life followed some of them in November 2019. Mian Abdul Qayoom, the 71-year-old president of the Bar Association in Srinagar, had undergone angioplasty two months before his arrest; he was held in a prison in Uttar Pradesh. To detain an ailing man and keep him “thousands of kilometers away from his home is inhumane”, said his colleague and relative Mian Tufail. Parvez Ahmad, a father of two from Kulgam who had been operated on for cancer, was taken in a midnight raid on 5 August and lodged in a jail in Uttar Pradesh. Waseem Ahmad, a ninth-class student from Shopian, was moved to a jail near Lucknow. Nadeem Ahmad Wani, a college student from Kulgam, was held on the strength of an accusation from 2014, when he had been a minor.

Courts that move slowly

Families went to the High Court in numbers it had never seen. By 17 November 2019, 610 habeas corpus petitions had been filed that year, 369 of them after 5 August. The normal timetable for such petitions is a decision within fifteen days. “But presently, the judges have to give at least four weeks time to the state,” the lawyer Mir Shafaqat Hussain, who filed more than half the petitions, told Kashmir Life, and further extensions followed.

Most orders that reach a judge are eventually quashed; Kashmir Life put the share at about 95 per cent in 2024. No official is punished for an order a court finds unlawful, because the Act protects them, and the months already spent in prison are not returned.

Journalists behind bars

Aasif Sultan, a reporter for the magazine Kashmir Narrator, was arrested on 27 August 2018 under India’s anti-terrorism law after he wrote a cover story about Burhan Wani. A special court granted him bail on 5 April 2022 after the state failed to produce evidence linking him to any armed group. He was detained under the Public Safety Act days later, held at Kot Bhalwal jail in Jammu and in May 2022 moved to Ambedkar Nagar jail in Uttar Pradesh. In December 2023 Justice Vinod Chatterji Koul of the High Court called the detention “illegal and unsustainable” and ordered his release. In 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported, he was arrested again hours after arriving home.

Sajad Gul, a journalist from Bandipora, was granted bail in another case on 15 January 2022 and detained under the Act the next day. It followed a video he had posted on 3 January 2022 of the relatives of a commander of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba protesting against his killing in a gunfight near Srinagar. On 9 November 2023 the High Court quashed the order, finding its grounds vague and no specific allegation that his activities endangered the security of the state.

An elected legislator

The Act is used against those Kashmir elects. On 8 September 2025 Mehraj Malik, the member of the legislative assembly for Doda and the Aam Aadmi Party’s leader in the territory, was detained on a district magistrate’s order for one year and held in Kathua jail. On 27 April 2026 Justice Mohd Yousuf Wani quashed the order for “non-application of mind”, finding that “almost all the criminal cases pertain to normal law and order violations” and that no live link tied the old incidents to any threat to public order. Malik had spent nearly eight months in prison. “When someone like me enters politics, jail becomes inevitable,” he said. “That is the price of speaking out.”

The chief minister, Omar Abdullah, himself once held under the same law, said: “He should never have been detained under PSA, in fact he should never have been detained at all.”

Still in force

The UN human rights office recommended in July 2019 that India amend the Act. The National Conference’s manifesto for the 2024 election promised plainly: “We will repeal the PSA.” When this article was reviewed the Act remained in force. In October 2026 the High Court quashed yet another order, against Gulzar Ahmad Bhat of Anantnag, issued on 30 January 2025 and carried out four months later, finding that the delay had snapped any “live and proximate link” between his alleged activities and the need to detain him.

Across nearly five decades the pattern Amnesty International described in 2011 has not changed. An official signs an order drawn from a police file. A Kashmiri, often young, sometimes a child, sometimes a journalist or an elected representative, goes to prison without charge, often far from home. Months later a judge finds that the order should never have been made, and no one is held to account for it.