Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah was detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA) on September 16 and his residence was declared a jail.

The 81-year-old National Conference leader has been under preventive detention since August 5 when the Centre announced abrogation of special status given to the state under Article 370 and its bifurcation into two Union territories - Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

This is the first time that a former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir has been booked under the PSA.

Abdullah, a three-term chief minister and five-time parliamentarian, has been booked under the ‘public order’ provision of the PSA.

The PSA has two sections - ‘public order’ and ‘threat to security of the state’. The former allows detention without trial for three to six months and the latter for two years.

The PSA is applicable only in Jammu and Kashmir. Elsewhere in the country, the equivalent law is the National Security Act.

An Act to fight timber smugglers

The stringent PSA was introduced in Jammu and Kashmir in 1978 to tackle timber smuggling as those involved in the crime at that time would easily get away with minimal detention.

Farooq’s father Sheikh Abdullah brought the Act as a deterrent against timber smugglers as it provided a jail term, without a trial, for up to two years.

However, this Act came in handy for the police and security forces during the early 1990s when militancy erupted in the state.

After the then Union home minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed enforced the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in the state in 1990, the PSA was used rampantly for picking up people in the state.

Detention under the PSA is subject to periodic review by an official screening committee and can be challenged at the High Court.

The Act was amended in 2012 and some of its stricter provisions were relaxed. After the amendment, the period up to which a first-time offender or individual can be put in detention without trial was reduced from two years to six months.

However, a provision has been kept in the Act to extend the detention, if necessary, to up to two years.

Key points of PSA

If the government considers it necessary or expedient that special precautions should be taken to prevent the entry of unauthorised persons, it can declare that place to be a prohibited place. No person shall, without the permission of the authority can enter or loiter in the vicinity of the prohibited place.

The government can detain a person with a view to preventing him / her from acting in any manner prejudicial to the security of the state or the maintenance of public order.

When a person is detained, the authorities are required to inform the detainee about the grounds on which the order has been made within 10 days. However, the Act also states that the authority shall not disclose facts which it considers to be against the public interest.

A detention order may, at any time, be revoked or modified by the government. The government may at any time order that a person detained in pursuance of detention order may be released for any specified period.

Many arrested under PSA

In 2015, the state government revealed that it had arrested a total of 133 people under the provisions of PSA in one year.

A UN report, titled ‘Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016 to April 2018’, revealed that more than 1,000 Kashmiris were held under the PSA between March 2016 and August 2017.

Another report by a human rights organisation says that between March 2016 and August 2017, 941 petitions were filed in the J&K High Court for quashing of PSA. The High Court quashed 764 (81 per cent) cases, it said.