Supreme Court has fixed March 17 as the date for hearing a plea challenging Omar Abdullah’s detention under the Public Safety Act (PSA).
The petition was moved the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir’s sister Sarah Abdullah.
She has accused the J&K administration of usurping the “right to liberty” of her brother by placing him under the PSA despite him being under detention for last six months.
The apex court had earlier fixed March 5 as the date of hearing the petition. However, Sara’s counsel and Congress lawmaker Kapil Sibal was informed by the bench on Thursday that the hearing in the case has been postponed till March 17.
Sara’s petition, moved before the bench in February, said Omar had no access to communication since August last year. His tweets and public statements issued before Article 370 repeal suggest that he advocated for peace at all cost.
“All the public statements and messages posted by Omar Abdullah during the period up to his first detention would reveal that he kept calling for peace and co-operation – messages which in Gandhi’s India cannot remotely affect public order,” the petition states.
“The PSA order conflates ‘Governmental policy’ with the ‘Indian State’, suggesting that any opposition to the former constitutes a threat to the latter. This is wholly antithetical to a democratic polity and undermines the Indian Constitution”, the plea further added.
