PSA DOSSIER CITES ANTI-GOVT POSTS, ALLIANCE WITH EX-MLA
SHAH FAESAL WAS DETAINED AT THE DELHI AIRPORT ON AUGUST 14, 2019, AFTER HE REACHED THE CAPITAL FROM SRINAGAR
SRINAGAR: Former IAS officer and J&K leader Shah Faesal’s dossier cites ‘anti government’ posts and alliance with former legislator Engineer Shiekh Abdul Rashid as grounds of his detention under the stringent Public Safety Act (PSA).
Shah Faesal was detained at the Delhi airport on August 14, 2019, after he reached the Capital from Srinagar and was sent back to Kashmir.
He was detained at the Centaur Hotel and later at MLA hostel. At around 12:00am on Saturday, a senior official of the J&K administration handed Faesal the PSA dossier with the 27 pages printout of his social media posts in last few years, especially after he quit IAS.
“The dossier had 27 pages of print out of his Facebook posts/tweets on Kashmir,” said a close associate of Faesal, who is privy to contents of the dossier.
Before his arrest, the Bureaucrat-turned-politician was regularly updating his social media accounts in which many of the posts were critical of the government. He had good following on social media and even generated money for his new political party Jammu and Kashmir Political Movement (JKPM).
The posts, which government thought to be critical to government were highlighted as the grounds for invoking the PSA.
The preventive detention of Faesal had ended on Friday night and the administration had two options— either to place him under house arrest like other several mainstream politicians or to book him under the PSA. The administration decided to choose the latter.
In the dossier, Shah Faesal’s alliance with former Langate legislator, engineer Shiekh Abdul Rashid, was also mentioned as one of the grounds for his detention.
During last year’s Lok Sabha elections, independent legislator Rashid had contested polls from Baramulla Lok Sabha seat and secured more than one lakh votes. Days before the polls, Faesal had asked people of north Kashmir to vote for Rashid as he too had decided to cast his vote in his favor. In June last year, Faesal who by then had formed his own political party decided to enter into an alliance with Rashid to contest the assembly polls in J&K.