Guilty By The Cover: Kashmir Court Rejects Detention Over Book Titles

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer) By Sanjeev Sirohi

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Srinagar- The knock came in Kukroosa, a village in Handwara, in the Kupwara district of north Kashmir, where Shafat Maqbool Wani, known to neighbours as Shaf, had grown up reading.

By September 13, 2025, he was no longer a graduate student weighing invitations to academic conferences abroad. He was a detenue, held under detention order No. 27-DMK/PSA of 2025, signed by the district magistrate of Kupwara under the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act, on the theory that his books and his bloodline together made him a threat to state security.

Wani had already been cleared once.

On September 8, 2025, a special National Investigation Agency judge in Jammu rejected a bid by the NIA to extend his remand beyond 155 days.

Five days later, that same court granted him bail in the underlying case, an FIR from Handwara police station alleging offenses under the Arms Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

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Within hours of the bail order, the district magistrate signed the detention order that kept him locked up anyway, this time invoking a law built for preventing future harm rather than punishing a proven one.

The grounds cited against him leaned heavily on genealogy.

His father had once belonged to Al-Barq, a militant outfit, before surrendering in 1990, and the order reasoned that anti-India, separatist feeling had settled into the son since childhood as a result.

Investigators pointed also to his scholarship: invitations to present at a graduate conference at Columbia University and at Dublin City University's South Asia conference, alongside literature seized from his possession, including a book he had written, titled“Construction of an Islamic Order in Hindutva Reimagination”.

His detention landed a year after the administration banned 25 books in August 2025, most concerning Kashmir's history, on the theory that they promoted secessionist sentiment and false narratives.

Wani's case, filed with the High Court as HCP No. 312/2025, became a test of what that ban, and the broader logic behind it, could actually justify.

His lawyers pressed three points above all others: that the detaining authority had failed to name a single specific act of his anywhere in the grounds that could count as prejudicial to state security, that beyond the Handwara FIR, no prejudicial activity, however minor, had been attributed to him, and that no compelling reason existed for detention at all.

The government's response, filed in a counter-affidavit, insisted the order followed proper procedure: that the authority had applied its mind, that none of Wani's rights had been violated, that the full record relied upon had been furnished to him and read out and explained, and that he had been told he could petition both the government and the detaining authority against the order.

Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi, sitting alone on the High Court bench in Srinagar, heard the petition over video link, reserved judgment on August 13, 2026, ruled on September 2, and saw the decision uploaded the following day.

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She looked at the case with a simple, methodical skepticism, and acknowledged that officials knew of the bail grant and had disclosed it themselves, yet found no evidence they had made any real effort to test whether Wani's conduct actually warranted detention.

Drawing on a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, Ameena Begum v. State of Telangana, Justice Kazmi laid out what such an order must show: a genuine belief based on facts, clear reasoning, a link between past conduct and present danger, grounds specific enough for the detenue to respond to, and strict compliance with legal timelines.

Wani's file, she concluded, met almost none of it.

The claim that separatist ideology had taken root in him because of his father's history, she wrote, amounted to an illusion, and detaining a man on that basis was an unmindful use of power.

The literature investigators had flagged had in part been wrongly attributed to him, and even where authorship was genuine, a scholar working across primary sources is expected to hold a range of material, some of it discomforting.

Owning books with grim titles, the judge ordered, does not make their owner a criminal.

She quashed the order, directed Wani's immediate release from custody, and ordered the detention record returned to government counsel.

The ruling leaves the book ban itself untouched, but it draws a boundary the government's order had ignored: a shelf of difficult scholarship, even one containing a writer's own contested work, is not itself a case.

A preventive detention regime that has often leaned on ideology and inheritance as evidence now faces a pointed reminder: the law asks for proof rather than lineage.

Wani, freed after a year of extensions and rejections, returns to Kupwara with his release order in hand and his books, presumably, still on the shelf.

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