Months after being reinstated in IAS, Shah Faesal withdraws SC plea challenging Article 370 revocation
IAS officer Shah Faesal has withdrawn his petition from the Supreme Court challenging the Presidential order to scrap Article 370, that granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir, Bar & Bench reported.
Faesal was among 23 petitioners who had challenged the Centre’s decision to abrogate provisions of Article 370.
Shah Faesal’s decision to withdraw the petition comes months after he was taken back into the Indian Administrative Service in April this year and appointed Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Culture.
Faesal resigned from service in protest in 2019 to float his own political party in Jammu and Kashmir. However, his resignation had never been accepted by the government and he withdrew it later.
At the time of his resignation, he had tweeted, “To protest the unabated killings in Kashmir and absence of any credible political initiative from Union government, I have decided to resign from IAS. Kashmiri lives matter.”
In March 2019, he floated his own political party, the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Movement (JKPM). Following the August 5, 2019 decisions that stripped the erstwhile state of its special status and bifurcated it into Union Territories, Faesal, in an interview to The Indian Express on August 10, called the government decision on Kashmir a “catastrophic turn in our collective history”.
Later, Faesal was stopped from flying to Istanbul, and was detained under Section 107 CrPC. He was ultimately released in June 2020. No cases are pending against him at the moment.
