In October 2024, something genuinely unusual happened in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections. Voters in Doda, a mountainous constituency nestled in the Chenab Valley — historically dominated by the National Conference and the BJP — sent a 36-year-old social worker named Mehraj Din Malik to the legislature. He ran on the Aam Aadmi Party ticket, and won by more than 4,000 votes. It was AAP’s first and only assembly seat in the union territory. To the people of Doda, it felt like proof that the ballot still meant something.
Less than a year later, Malik was behind bars.
On September 8, 2025, the District Magistrate of Doda issued a detention order — No. 05 of 2025 — booking Malik under the Public Safety Act for allegedly disturbing public order. The grounds cited spanned 18 FIRs and 16 daily diary reports accumulated between 2014 and 2025, along with a recent confrontation with the Deputy Commissioner over the relocation of a health sub-centre and pending flood-relief payments. In other words, for doing what legislators are supposed to do: demanding accountability from the administration on behalf of the people who elected him.
Malik was first sent to Bhaderwah Jail, then transferred to Kathua District Jail, more than 200 kilometres from his constituency. He has been there ever since.
The PSA and the Architecture of Preventive Detention
To understand what has happened to Mehraj Malik, it is necessary to understand the Public Safety Act itself. Enacted in 1978, the PSA allows for detention without formal charge or trial for up to two years in cases deemed a threat to public safety or public order. It requires no conviction, no jury, no cross-examination of evidence. A district magistrate’s satisfaction is sufficient. Human rights groups have long criticised the law as a tool for indefinite imprisonment under the cover of administrative procedure, and the Supreme Court has occasionally struck down its application in specific cases — but the law itself endures.
What made Malik’s detention exceptional was its target. He is, as multiple sources have confirmed, the first sitting legislator in Jammu and Kashmir to be booked under the PSA in recent memory. Sitting lawmakers carry a public mandate. They hold the right to speak on the floor of an elected house. Detaining one under a preventive detention law — without charge, without trial, without conviction — strips a constituency of its representative and, in doing so, inverts the relationship between the state and the people who elected that representative.
The optics were not lost on political observers. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, whose own National Conference had won the election with significant margins, publicly condemned the detention within two days. In a post on X, Omar wrote that there was “no justification” for detaining Malik under the PSA. “He’s not a threat to ‘public safety,'” he noted, adding that using “this discredited law” to detain him was wrong. He went further: “If the unelected government can use its powers against an elected representative like this, how does anyone expect the people of Jammu and Kashmir to continue to have faith in democracy?” When a sitting Chief Minister describes part of his own government’s apparatus as “unelected” while condemning an action taken within his jurisdiction, the fracture lines in J&K’s post-2019 constitutional structure become visible.
AAP’s national leadership was no quieter. Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh flew to Srinagar to protest, only to be placed under de facto house arrest at the Circuit House, with police locking the gates to prevent him from holding a march. Arvind Kejriwal condemned the detention. CPI(M) leader M.Y. Tarigami called the PSA a “black and draconian law” and said applying it to an elected representative set a “very wrong precedent.” The breadth of condemnation was unusual — parties that rarely agree on anything in J&K found common cause in calling this arrest an affront to democratic norms.
A Courtroom Drama That Has Stretched Across Months
On September 24, 2025, Malik filed a habeas corpus petition — HCP No. 139/2025 — in the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh at Jammu, challenging the legality of his detention and seeking its quashing along with Rs 5 crore in compensation for the alleged violation of his fundamental rights. Justice Vinod Chatterji Koul admitted the petition and issued notices to the Principal Secretary of the Home Department, the District Magistrate of Doda, the SSP, and the Superintendent of Kathua jail.
What followed was a protracted chain of adjournments that stretched into winter and beyond. The case was heard by multiple benches. On November 20 and December 4, 2025, Justice Mohd Yousuf Wani heard partial arguments and listed the matter as “part-heard.” By late December, the next hearing was fixed for January 29, 2026, and the case was subsequently scheduled for final hearing on February 5. On February 23, 2026, Justice Yousuf Wani reserved the verdict — but a judgment has yet to be pronounced. Both parties were given a week to file written synopses and additional submissions. The silence since then has grown conspicuous.
It is this silence that has become its own political fact. Malik’s supporters — many of them young, first-time voters who chose democracy over cynicism — have watched a legal process that should have proceeded with urgency drag on across seasons. His constituency has been without effective representation for more than seven months. His party has been without its J&K unit president. And those who saw his election as evidence that the democratic experiment in Jammu and Kashmir was genuine are left asking what that experiment actually means.
The delay in pronouncing a verdict on a habeas corpus petition — a legal instrument designed precisely for expedient relief in cases of unlawful detention — is particularly troubling. Courts in India have long held that habeas corpus petitions must be heard and decided promptly. The Latin phrase itself means “you shall have the body.” It is one of the most ancient protections in common law jurisprudence, and its power lies in speed. When it moves slowly, it ceases to be the protection it was designed to be.
Opposition voices have not let the delay pass without comment. The longer the judgment is reserved without pronouncement, the more the case becomes a symbol rather than just a legal proceeding. Whether or not the reservation is explained by judicial complexity or caseload pressures, the political effect is the same: the public perception that the system is in no hurry to resolve the question of whether an elected lawmaker is being held without lawful basis.
The 1987 Parallel and the Cost of Suppressed Democratic Energy
Kashmir Times, in a recent commentary, drew a comparison that is uncomfortable but historically honest. In 1987, election results in the Valley were widely believed to have been manipulated against the Muslim United Front, whose candidates included individuals who later led armed militant organisations. The young people who had invested in polling booths instead of grievance were pushed — through the suppression of their democratic expression — toward an entirely different kind of politics. The turmoil that followed consumed the region for decades.
The comparison is not one-to-one, and it should not be overstated. But its core warning is not about replication — it is about pattern. When people who have chosen democracy are shown that democracy will not protect them, the consequences are not merely political. They are generational. The voters of Doda who chose Mehraj Malik were not radicals. They were, by all accounts, ordinary constituents tired of being taken for granted, who decided to back an honest, local candidate from a party that had no history of broken promises in their region. That the candidate they sent to the assembly has spent most of his first year in jail — without trial, without conviction — tells them something about the value of the choice they made.
Governance Without Accountability
The Malik case also exposes a structural paradox in Jammu and Kashmir’s current constitutional arrangement. Since the revocation of Article 370 in 2019, J&K has been a union territory. The elected government — led by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah — has limited powers. The Lieutenant Governor, appointed by the Centre, retains significant administrative authority, including over the police. This means that when Malik was detained, the action was taken by an administration that does not report to the elected assembly in any direct sense. Omar Abdullah condemned the arrest. He also could not stop it or reverse it. This is not a detail. It is the heart of the problem.
A Chief Minister who calls an action “illegal, undemocratic, and harmful to democracy” but is unable to prevent or undo it is not, in any meaningful sense, governing. And a legislature whose members can be detained by an administration outside the elected government’s control is not, in any meaningful sense, sovereign. The Malik case makes this visible in a way that abstract constitutional arguments rarely do.
India’s official narrative on J&K is that the post-2019 changes have brought development, normalcy, and democratic participation. The 2024 elections, with their reasonable turnout figures, were presented as evidence. But the detention of the election’s most symbolically significant winner — the sole legislator of a party that ran on reform and accountability — within less than a year of his victory, without formal charges, under a law condemned as draconian by the sitting Chief Minister, is a direct counter-narrative. It does not have to be read as deliberate suppression to function as such.
What the Reserved Judgment Means
When the High Court reserved its order on February 23, 2026, and the judgment remained unpronounced weeks later, two things happened simultaneously. The legal process continued — this is not a case that has been abandoned or dismissed. But the political signal hardened. Every day that passes without a judgment is, for Malik’s supporters and for the wider opposition, another day of evidence that the system moves slowly when the inconvenience falls on those who challenged authority.
This matters beyond Jammu and Kashmir. India has, in recent years, faced international scrutiny over the treatment of political detainees, press freedom, and the use of preventive detention laws. The Malik case is a test not only of the High Court’s willingness to act, but of whether the constitutional safeguards that distinguish India from its regional authoritarian neighbours are functioning as designed.
An elected lawmaker, detained without trial, unable to represent his constituency, his habeas corpus petition pending for more than seven months: this is not the image of a democracy that has resolved the troubled politics of its most contested region. It is the image of a democracy that is still, in crucial ways, unfinished.
The people of Doda chose democracy when cynicism would have been easier. They went to polling booths, cast their votes, and sent their man to the assembly. That choice deserves an answer — not someday, but now. The High Court’s reserved judgment is not merely a legal proceeding; it is, at this moment, the last institutional line between a functioning democracy and one that exists only on paper. Indian government has spent years telling the world, and its own citizens, that Jammu and Kashmir has turned a corner. Mehraj Malik’s continued detention, and the silence where a verdict should be, is the most honest measure of how far that corner still is.
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Anzer Ayoob is the Founder and Chief Editor to The Chenab Times
