Will repeal Public Safety Act if we win: Omar

Regional National Conference (NC) leader and former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah on Saturday said that his party will quash all the cases against the stone pelters if voted to power in next assembly elections.

"We will withdraw all cases against the stone pelters if we form the next government," he said while addressing an election rally at Khanabal in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district.

The NC leader reiterated that his party will abrogate the controversial Public Safety Act (PSA) after coming to power. "I assure you and through you I assure the people of Jammu and Kashmir that the day National Conference makes its government on its own, God willing in 2019, within days I will repeal PSA," he said.

According to the 2010 Amnesty report ‘A Lawless Law: Detentions under the Public Safety Act (PSA)’, 10,000-20,000 people have been detained under this preventive detention law since it was enacted in 1978.

The PSA, one of the forms of administrative detention, enacted by Omar’s grandfather and then-CM late Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah to take action against the timber mafia, allows preventive detention for people against whom there may be no recognised criminal offence. It provides for detention for a maximum of two years in the case of persons acting in any manner “prejudicial to the security of the state”.

While claiming that NC had won the Baramulla Lok Sabha seat, which went to polls in the first phase of five-phase polls on April 11, Omar said that the party will win the Anantnag seat as well if people come out to vote instead of boycotting it.