By team
Jammu: After being slapped with two criminal cases for allegedly circulating government confidential information over WhatsApp and one for allegedly cheating a businessman, Tarun Behl, who owns two newspapers in Jammu, was slapped with a preventive detention order on 5 September 2024.
The order passed under the Public Safety Act (PSA), 1978, which allows detention for up to two years without charge or trial, was passed on the same day Behl received bail in the third case.
Four months later, on 2 January this year, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed the order, calling it “malice-filled” and “illegal.”
Justice Rahul Bharti said, “The petitioner’s ultimate arrest and detention on 06.09.2024 is a pointer to the fact that the petitioner was somehow being eyed upon to be a witch-hunt by the authorities and that is exhibited from the aforesaid sequence.”
Behl was arrested in three criminal cases and served one preventive detention order in two months. The preventive detention order was passed on the same day he was granted bail in the third case in September 2024.
Preventive Detention Abuse
This follows a pattern of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) police using preventive detention to keep journalists incarcerated even after bail is granted by a trial court or the high court. Article 14 has reported on three such cases (here, here and here).
The law, including preventive detention, has been weaponised to stamp out any critical journalism coming out of the conflict-ridden region since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the centre in May 2014 and then rescinded its autonomy in August 2019.
More than 50 Kashmiri journalists have been “summoned” by the police for questioning, raided, targeted with frivolous legal cases, or jailed since 2019, the Caravan reported in February 2022.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
