On the morning of November 10, 2024, police came to a house in Akramabad, Doda, and took away Rehmatullah Padder. He was 28. He worked with a local NGO that distributed aid and filed complaints about broken drains. By evening he was in Central Jail, Kot Bhalwal, held under the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act.
Eighteen months passed. On May 21, 2026, the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh ordered his release.
The Division Bench — Chief Justice Arun Palli and Justice Rajneesh Oswal — quashed the detention on procedural grounds. The authorities had taken over a month and a half to decide on Padder’s representation against his own detention, and had not properly communicated the outcome to him. That was enough.
A Civic Volunteer, a Dossier, and a Disputed Law
The Public Safety Act was enacted in 1978, originally to deal with timber smuggling. It allows detention without trial for up to two years. Over the decades it became a standard instrument of security policy in Jammu and Kashmir, used against separatists, stone-pelters, and others deemed a threat to public order or state security. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have long documented what they describe as its systematic misuse.
The detention order against Padder — PSA-02 of 2024, signed by the District Magistrate of Doda on November 9 — listed five FIRs registered against him going back to 2016. It described him as an Over Ground Worker for militants who made provocative speeches, incited youth, and was in contact with people across the Line of Control.
His family said most of that was wrong. He had been fully discharged in one of the 2016 cases and cleared of major charges in the other. The remaining FIRs, they argued, were ordinary disputes — a trespass complaint, a minor altercation — with no connection to militancy.
Padder had been a volunteer with the Ababeel NGO in Doda, involved in flood relief and welfare work for widows and orphans. He had also been raising complaints about the local administration — about the implementation of Swachh Bharat Mission waste management schemes and alleged irregularities in sewerage projects. He supported Aam Aadmi Party candidate Mehraj Malik in elections. Malik won the Doda assembly seat and was among the first to publicly condemn the arrest.
Raja Shakeel, an AAP leader in Jammu & Kashmir, said the Padder case was part of a broader pattern. “This is not the first PSA that has been quashed — it is the fourth or fifth invoked by former Deputy Commissioner of Doda, Harvinder Singh,” he told this reporter. Shakeel listed the others: a PSA against Mohammad Rafi alias Pinka Sheikh, one against a local youth for alleged timber smuggling, and what he described as the most high-profile of all — a detention order against sitting MLA and AAP State President Mehraj Malik himself. “All these individuals, including the MLA, were freed by the court,” Shakeel said. “Every single PSA has been quashed.”
“This is not a security case,” one activist familiar with Padder told me at the time. “This is what happens when someone becomes inconvenient.”
Our outlet, The Chenab Times, was among the first to report on Padder’s detention — carrying both the administration’s position and the family’s account. The administration said he was an OGW with five FIRs against him. His family said he was detained for exposing alleged corruption in a sewage treatment plant. We reported both. Days later, the Directorate of Information and Public Relations in Doda issued a formal notice to The Chenab Times, accusing the portal of “pitching the elected representative against administration” and warning that the “tone and content tried to put the administrative procedure in a bad light.” The letter warned of action if the outlet failed to explain its position. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the notice and called on authorities to halt what it described as harassment of journalists. It was, to my knowledge, the first instance since the formation of an elected government in Jammu and Kashmir following the revocation of Article 370 that media reporting had been formally contested in this manner.
The Legal Battle and the Procedural Failure
A writ petition — HCP No. 154/2024 — was filed challenging the detention. In July 2025, a single judge dismissed it. The government had followed procedure, the court found. The detention stood.
The family appealed. In Letters Patent Appeal No. 159/2025, the Division Bench looked at the same record and reached a different conclusion.
Padder’s brother had submitted a representation against the detention on November 22, 2024 — less than two weeks after the arrest — to the Chairman of the Advisory Board, the Commissioner/Secretary of the Home Department, and the District Magistrate, Doda.
The District Magistrate rejected it on December 5, 2024. He never told Padder. The Home Department rejected it on January 21, 2025, more than two months after it was submitted. The date it was actually communicated to Padder was not specified in the record.
The court found this unacceptable. Even if communication is assumed to have happened on January 21, it still took over one and a half months — which the bench called an impermissible delay.
The bench drew on the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling in Sarabjeet Singh Mokha vs. District Magistrate, Jabalpur, which established that the right to make a representation includes the right to have it considered quickly and to be told the outcome promptly. Delay or failure to communicate renders the detention illegal. The Advisory Board process does not substitute for the government’s obligation to act on the representation independently and without delay.
The writ court had not properly dealt with this. Its judgment was set aside. The detention order was quashed. Padder was directed to be released, provided he was not wanted in any other case.
The Larger Pattern
The PSA has faced growing criticism since August 2019, when Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status was revoked and the region was reorganised into two Union Territories under direct central government administration. Critics argue detentions under the law have increased while judicial oversight has struggled to keep pace.
The government’s position is that militancy, though reduced, remains a real threat, and that tools like the PSA are necessary. Officials point to cases like this one — where courts did ultimately intervene — as evidence that the system works.
But Padder was in jail for eighteen months before that intervention came. The single judge who first reviewed his case found nothing wrong. It took an appeal to a Division Bench to catch what the court itself described as a failure to address a crucial aspect of the case.
Legal aid groups working in the region say this is not unusual. Detenus are routinely held for extended periods before courts find flaws — stale FIRs, mechanical drafting, ignored representations — that should have been visible from the start.
What drew attention to the Padder case specifically was who he was. Not a separatist, not someone with a sustained record of militant association. A young NGO volunteer who raised complaints about drains and attended election rallies. Whether his detention was a genuine security assessment or something else is not something the court needed to decide. The procedural failures were sufficient to end it.
What the Judgment Means
The ruling reaffirms a principle that courts in Jammu and Kashmir have had to state repeatedly: the executive’s power to detain without trial comes with procedural obligations, and ignoring those obligations has consequences. A government cannot detain someone under the PSA and then handle the paperwork carelessly.
For Padder’s family, the judgment means he comes home. For the lawyers and activists who have spent years fighting PSA cases, it adds to a long record of successful challenges — though they would note that each success represents someone who spent months or years in detention first.
Rehmatullah Padder has been ordered free. When he walks out of Central Jail, the law that put him there will remain on the books.
Anzer Ayoob is the Founder and Chief Editor to The Chenab Times