Mubashir NaikIn a quiet village at the foothills of the Himalayas in Kulgam, a southern district in India-administered Kashmir, the air still carries the echo of a prolonged gunfight.
Along the narrow road that cuts through the crowded neighbourhoods stands a multi-storey house belonging to Abdul Bari, once a professor of geography and women’s studies, now held under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA).
On the first floor, his family sits in silence, unable to understand why a man known locally for his activism against corruption and sexual exploitation has been taken away. They ask what crime he has committed and whether exposing scandals has now become punishable.
“We don’t know why he has been booked under the PSA. He exposed sex scandals, land mafia gangs, and worked for public welfare. We want to know what crime he has committed, he is being punished,” said one of the family members, requesting anonymity.
PSA or Public Safety Act has long been a defining feature of Kashmir’s legal landscape.
It allows detention without trial for up to two years on grounds of public order or security.
Introduced in 1978 to curb timber smuggling, the law was weaponised during Kashmir’s 1990s insurgency against the New Delhi rule. It has since been used against civilians, political dissidents, and, more recently, academics and activists.
“It (PSA) has become an instrument of arbitrary repression,” says advocate Umair Ronga, whose father was also detained under the PSA last year. Ronga argues that the law’s application in Kashmir has steadily hollowed out the principles of constitutional democracy and the rule of law.
Lawyers, activists and journalists, individuals who form the conscience of a democratic society, are being systematically intimidated and silenced through unjust detentions. This sustained misuse is occurring in stark defiance of judicial oversight, according to Ronga.
“PSA was primarily against identified militant suspects, and has been notoriously applied against Kashmiri civilians,” says Vertika Mani, Human Rights Lawyer and Secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).
"During our recent visit to Kashmir, we observed that the misuse of the PSA has become a critical inflection point in this ongoing pattern of repression,” she tells TRT World.
Post the attack in Pahalgam on April 22, dozens of individuals have been booked under PSA in different parts of India-administered Kashmir and twenty-three were booked in the summer capital in Srinagar alone.
‘Lawless law’
To Amnesty International and even the Supreme Court of India, PSA remains a “lawless law”.
To many Kashmiris, it is a reminder that legality in the valley often serves as cover for arbitrary repression. Journalists, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens have been detained under its provisions.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, whose grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, introduced the law, was detained for six months under the same law when the Modi government stripped the region of its limited autonomy in August 2019.
During his election campaign, months before his 2019 detention, Abdullah had pledged to revoke PSA if returned to power.
Journalists such as Sajad Gul, Majid Hydari, were detained, and then released on bail. Academics like Bari, and members of the civil society, Irfan Mehraj and Khurram Parvez, remain jailed without bail.
Amnesty International has tracked the rising number of petitions against such detentions.
Between 2014 and 2019, 272 habeas corpus petitions were filed in the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir. After 2019, the figure rose to 2,080, most of them in Srinagar, where cases now take an average of nearly eleven months to be heard.
The Amnesty report also reveals that nearly 37 per cent of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) cases all over India were registered in Kashmir. Under UAPA, bail is denied for months at a time.
Rights groups reported that more than three thousand individuals had been taken into custody, with around a hundred formally booked under the PSA.
“This is in clear violation of the Supreme Court judgment of Jaseela Shaji Vs The Union of India & Ors.," Mani says.
For lawyers in the valley the pattern has become familiar: orders are challenged and frequently quashed, yet detaining authorities face no consequences, encouraging a cycle of impunity.
According to Ronga, the law is deployed not as a last resort but as the state’s default response to dissent. He adds that the High Court now quashes PSA detention orders almost daily.
Ensnarling web of PSA
The dossier prepared against Bari reflects the structure of these cases.
Compiled by the police and submitted to the district magistrate of Srinagar, it describes him as a man long influenced by radical ideas, in contact since childhood with disgruntled elements who encouraged him to adopt anti-national views.
It alleges that he used social media platforms, from Facebook to YouTube, to advocate separatism and circulate inflammatory content. Out of eight cases registered against him between 2018 and 2025, two were filed under the UAPA.
Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s co-media Incharge of Kashmir, Advocate Sajid Yousuf Shah, has called him a “public nuisance”.
In an interview with TRT World, Shah said that Bari regularly defamed people on social media without providing any credible evidence. “Even if he possessed proof, he was required to follow due legal procedures. Instead, he took it upon himself to act as the police, judiciary, and administration.”
A recent case from June 2025 claimed Bari uploaded objectionable material on Facebook; though he was granted interim bail, the police argued that there was a strong likelihood he would continue the same activities. On this basis, the magistrate authorised his preventive detention.
To Bari’s supporters, the picture is quite different.
Lawyers and human rights defenders see his arrest as part of the wider erosion of democratic space in the valley. He won national awards in geography and published books and research papers.
Through the Right to Information Act, he exposed irregular appointments, dubious land transfers and questionable mining contracts.
His first arrest came in 2021, when he was accused under the UAPA of inciting unrest through speeches and social media posts. After months in jail, he was granted bail.
In 2021, he was accused of anti-national activities and terminated from his teaching post by the order of the Lieutenant Governor, Manoj Sinha.
“If the central government is serious about earning the trust of Kashmiris, it must begin by addressing the lived realities of its Kashmiri citizens in the region,” Mani says.
Bari’s family recalls how, on the morning of July 1, he received a call instructing him to report to the cyber police station. He left home as asked. Two days later, they learnt he had been detained under the PSA. Since then, his elderly parents have spent their days in prayer, struggling to bear the absence of their son.
