IAS Officer Shah Faesal Withdraws SC Plea Against Revocation of Article 370

Faseal's move comes months after he was reinstated into the Indian Administrative Service in April 2022.

Former IAS Officer Shah Faesal

(Photo Courtesy: Facebook/Shah Faesal)

Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Shah Faesal, who filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the Presidential Order to scrap Article 370, withdrew his petition on Tuesday, 20 September. 

Shah Faesal was one of the 23 petitioners who had challenged the Centre's decision to abrogate provisions of Article 370, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir. 

Faesal's move to withdraw the petition came months after he was reinstated into the IAS in April 2022 and was subsequently appointed as the Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Culture. 

He resigned from service in 2019 to float his own political outfit, the Jammu and Kashmir People's Movement (JKMP). He had then said: 

"To protest the unabated killings in Kashmir and the absence of any credible political initiative from the Union government, I have decided to resign from IAS. Kashmiri lives matter."

However, Faesal withdrew his resignation, which was never accepted by the government in the first place.

In an interview with PTI in 2020, Faesal said that his decision to join politics did more harm than good as his "innocuous act" of dissent was seen as an "act of treason." He added that his act had discouraged a lot of civil services aspirants and that his colleagues felt betrayed by him.

"It upset me a lot," he added

On his decision to form a political party, Faesal had said he wanted to revive democratic politics in Jammu and Kashmir.

Who Is Shah Faesal? 

Faesal, who is also a doctor, was the managing director of the Jammu and Kashmir Power Development Corporation (JKPDC). Before that, he went to Harvard University in the United States to pursue further studies.

Hailing from the remote village of Lolab in north Kashmir, Faesal, whose father was killed by terrorists in 2002, topped the UPSC examination in 2009.

Faesal was vocal about the "unprecedented curbs" on the people of Jammu and Kashmir after the abrogation of the operative provisions of Article 370 and had called the government's decision in Kashmir a "catastrophic turn in our collective history."

He was detained at the Delhi airport while he was travelling to Istanbul under Section 107 of the CrPC and was sent back to Srinagar to be placed under detention.

After spending six months in preventive detention – first at the Sher-e-Kashmir International Conference Centre (SKICC) and then at Srinagar's MLA hostel – he was booked under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) in February 2020, which was revoked four months later.

He was released in June 2020. No cases are currently pending against Faesal.