“So far as DDR entries recorded against the petitioner are concerned, a perusal of the grounds of detention would show that those have not culminated in any criminal cases and merely recording DDRs alleging no specific acts cannot be the ground to detain a person,” Justice M.A. Chowdhary observed. Photo: https://www.cdjlawjournal.com/
Quashing a Public Safety Act (PSA) against a local from Jammu’s Kishtwar, the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) High Court on Thursday (September 11, 2025) observed that “merely recording Daily Diary Reports (DDRs) by the police alleging no specific acts cannot be the ground to detain a person”.
“So far as DDR entries recorded against the petitioner are concerned, a perusal of the grounds of detention would show that those have not culminated in any criminal cases and merely recording DDRs alleging no specific acts cannot be the ground to detain a person,” Justice M.A. Chowdhary observed.
The Court quashed the impugned detention order passed by the District Magistrate, Kishtwar under PSA, a law that deals with preventive custody up to two years. It directed that the detainee be released from the preventive custody forthwith, “if not required in any other case”.
The District Magistrate, Kishtwar, had slapped PSA on Mohammad Jaffer Sheikh, son of Ghulam Mohd Sheikh, a resident of Nattas, Dool, Kishtwar. The accused was booked under Section 8 of J&K Public Safety Act, 1978 in an order passed in November 2024, “with a view to prevent him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the ‘security of the State’”.
However, advocates Sheikh Shakil Ahmed and Rahul Raina, who appeared for the accused, pleaded before the court that the stale cases or FIRs of the year 1997, 2015 and 2019 were made the basis for passing the detention order, “which has no proximate link with the necessity for detention”.
The advocates informed the court that the entire material forming the basis of the grounds of detention “was neither supplied nor explained to him in the language he understands”.
“Personal liberty is one of the most cherished freedoms, perhaps more important than the other freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution and it was for this reason that the founding fathers enacted the safeguards in Article 22 of the Constitution so as to limit the power of the State to detain a person without trial, which may otherwise pass the test of Article 21, by humanising the harsh authority over individual liberty,” Justice Chowdhary observed.
J&K saw a number of cases of PSA in the past few years. The High Court recently quashed PSA on the grounds of “mistakenly detained”.
“The vitiating fact appearing in the grounds of detention is worth serious notice, as admittedly the detenu is not involved in a criminal case on the basis whereof he has been detained, as it is someone else who has a similar name, who is stated to be involved in the case which founds basis for prevention detention of the detenu,” Justice Moksha Khajuria Kazmi held, in the first week of September.
The Court observed that the detaining authority was “shamelessly” trying to support the issuance of the impugned order from material which does not speak of the involvement of the detainee in a case.
The Court observations came during the hearing of a habeas corpus petition filed by Waseem Ahmad Ganie, who was placed under preventive detention in April 2024 following an order by the District Magistrate, Anantnag. It surfaced that the FIR cited by the authorities actually pertained to one Imtiyaz Ahmad Wani, and not the petitioner, who shared a similar name, that is, Imtiyaz Ahmad Ganie.
Published – September 12, 2025 04:18 am IST