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The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued notice to the Jammu and Kashmir administration, and sought its response on a plea challenging the detention of former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti under the Public Safety Act.
A three-judge bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra passed the order in the habeas corpus petition filed by Mufti’s daughter Iltija. Habeas corpus is a writ seeking production of a person supposed to be in illegal detention before a court. The case will be next heard on 18 March.
The bench, also comprising Justices Vineet Saran and M.R. Shah, asked Iltija Mufti to submit an affidavit on the next date of hearing, declaring she has not filed any petition challenging the detention of her mother before other judicial fora, including the Jammu and Kashmir high court.
The petition challenges the government’s order issued on 5 February detaining Mufti under PSA. Advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan, representing Iltija, apprised the court that the dossier on the basis of which the PSA was invoked had no valid grounds and was “manifestly biased slanderous, libellous” towards the former J&K chief minister.
The petitioner alleges that cheap and personal comments have been written in the dossier on which the government order relies on. As per the petition, an inexhaustive list of “diabolically slanderous expressions and sentences” were used in the dossier. The petition stated that the dossier described Mufti’s politics as “cheap” and the detenu’s mindset variously to be “communal” , “divisive”, and that the main motive of the detenu was to “create an atmosphere of fear and chaos”. The petitioner also claims that not a single incident of incitement has been referred to in the dossier by the administration and the chief of People’s Democratic Party has been wrongly put under detention.
Earlier, the same bench had issued a notice to the J&K administration on a similar plea filed against the government notification invoking PSA against former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah.
PTI contributed to this story.
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