IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officer Shah Faesal who was reinstated in April of this year has withdrawn his petition challenging the abrogation of article 370 from the Supreme Court, Bar & Bench reported.
Faesal was among ‘23’ petitioners who had challenged the abrogation of the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir in the supreme court of India.
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.
He had resigned from IAS service in 2019 against the “unabated killings in Kashmir and absence of any credible political initiative from Union government” then he floated his own political party called Jammu and Kashmir people’s movement.
However, his resignation was never accepted by the government and he withdrew it later.
When the Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy was scrapped by central government’s BJP, Shah Faesal reacted saying one can either be a stooge or a separatist now.
“Abolition of Article 370 has finished the mainstream. Constitutionalists are gone. So you can either be a stooge or a separatist now. No shades of grey,” he said in 2019.
In an interview with The Indian Express on August 10 2019, he called the government decision on Kashmir a catastrophic turn in the collective history.
Later, Faesal was stopped from flying to Turkey. He was also detained under Section 107 CrPC. He was ultimately released in June 2020. No cases are pending against him at the moment.
It is pertinent to mention that article 370 was abrogated by BJP led Modi government on 5 August 2019, and the Supreme Court hasn’t heard a single petition since three years.