The Delhi High Court today sought a response from the Centre on a fresh application filed by Shah Faesal, founder of J&K People’s Movement Party, seeking a copy of the Look Out Circular (LOC) issued against him.
 
The Court asked the Centre to file reply by September 1 and the Court will hear the matter on September 3.
 
Shah Faesal was detained at the Delhi airport while he was trying to fly abroad and was sent back to Kashmir, later to be placed under preventive detention.
 
Faesal, who was stopped from taking a flight to Istanbul at the Delhi airport, was flown back to Srinagar where he was detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA).
 
Faesal had claimed he was travelling to Boston to complete an academic course at Harvard University but J&K police yesterday refuted the claims.
 
The Jammu and Kashmir Police said that the civil servant-turned-politician Shah Faesal did not have any document to support his claim that he was travelling to Boston to complete any academic course.
 
The J&K Police claimed that all he had with him was a ticket from Delhi to Turkey to Germany’s Frankfurt to Boston.
 
They also raised a question on the jurisdiction of the Delhi High Court in the case, as Faesal has been detained in Srinagar.
 
Faesal has been critical of the government’s decision to revoke the special status of J&K and turning it into a Union Territory.
 
The J&K Police also challenged the very ground of Faesal’s petition that he was detained without being informed about the reason for the action.
 
The police affidavit said that the grounds were explained to the petitioner who had refused to furnish a bond/security as required under section 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
 
The former IAS officer, who had first grabbed headlines by topping the UPSC examination, has been critical of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA government’s move to abrogate Article 370 and bifurcate Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories.
 
Taking to Twitter, Faesal had said that there were two choices before the Kashmiris – to be a stooge or to be a separatist.
 
“Kashmir will need a long, sustained, non-violent political mass movement for restoration of the political rights. Abolition of Article 370 has finished the mainstream. Constitutionalists are gone. So you can either be a stooge or a separatist now. No shades of grey,” his tweet had read.