Kashmiri IAS topper-turned-politician, Shah Faesal, was on Wednesday detained at the Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport when he was about to board a flight to leave the country.
Faesal was reportedly sent back to Srinagar, where he has been placed under house arrest under the Public Safety Act.
The act, which allows maximum detention of two years, is only applicable in Jammu and Kashmir.
His detention comes a week after the Parliament on August 6 revoked Article 370 of the Constitution and approved bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories.
Almost 400 political leaders of the Valley including two former chief ministers – Omar and Mehbooba are under detention.
On Tuesday, Shah Faesal had put out a tweet saying, “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…”
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.
— Shah Faesal (@shahfaesal) August 13, 2019
On the same day, in an interview to BBC, Faesal had said that “the Kashmiri constitution has been ‘murdered’ by Prime Minister Modi’s decision to end the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir”.
Shah Faesal, the 2010 Indian Administrative Service (IAS) topper, resigned in January this year from the elite service after having remained in the news for his controversial tweets for which the government had initiated an inquiry against him.
The officer, who was assigned his home cadre of Jammu-Kashmir, announced in a tweet that his resignation was to protest against the “unabated killings” in Kashmir.