Personal liberty not like skating on thin ice: J&K High Court quashes preventive detention of 19-year-old

The Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court has censured authorities in Anantnag for ordering the prevention detention of a 19-year-old under the Public Safety Act (PSA).

Justice Rahul Bharti observed,

"Personal liberty of a citizen of India guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India is not meant to be a matter of skating on a thin ice that at any given point of time a person can be tripped to suffer deprivation and loss by a fiat of Executive acting upon unfounded and mirage like suspicion, more particularly when it is a matter of a personal liberty of a young person who is otherwise meant to find life for himself/herself."

The Court ruled that there was “worth nothing” in the entire dossier to justify the concern of the police to file a case seeking preventive detention of the teenager. It added that there was no basis for the District Magistrate, Anantnag to pass the detention order.

“When this Court makes a comparative reading of the Dossier as well as the Grounds of the detention, this Courts finds the two are ‘much of a muchness’ and this is where very exercise of jurisdiction under the J&K Public Safety Act, 1978 right from its origin from the end of the Senior Superintendent of Police, Anantnag and culminating in issuance of detention order from the end of the respondent No.2-District Magistrate, Anantnag got on a wrong foot.

To put it in simple words, the petitioner has been detained just for nothing but purely on hollowed dubiety restored to by and at the end of the Senior Superintendent of Police, Anantnag and the respondent No.2-District Magistrate, Anantnag," the order stated.

The 19-year-old had approached the Court in June 2025 through his mother challenging the detention order passed against him on May 14, 2025. The teenager was a class XII student preparing for the NEET examination, as per the police.

In 2023, he was allegedly involved in a terror attack on a non-local labourer. Since he was a minor at that time, he was treated as a juvenile and granted bail in February 2025. Thereafter, he continued to remain under surveillance of the security agencies. Last year, the police sought his preventive detention. 

However, the Court found that there was nothing adverse in the dossier against him, except for the criminal case relating to the 2023 attack in which he had allegedly used a pistol. It noted that the detainee is being tried separately for that offence.

“The alleged commission of offence(s) by reference to FIR No. 171/2023 has to distance itself from the profiling of the petitioner in the context of evaluating as to whether his activities while being in the state of personal liberty were of the range and rank so as to fall within the scope of mischief of the J&K Public Safety Act, 1978 and for that purpose the period of studied surveillance is only when the petitioner came out upon his release from case custody on 04.02.2025 and remained so till getting detained on 18.05.2025,” it added.

The Court found that during the three months’ of personal liberty, there was nothing adverse against the teenager to seek his detention. 

“In the light of all aforesaid, the preventive detention of the petitioner is held to be illegal,” it said.

Advocate Syed Sajad Geelani represented the petitioner.

Government Advocate Ilyas Laway appeared for the State.

[Read Judgment]