J&K: High court dismisses Mehbooba Mufti’s plea to shift undertrials

JAMMU: The high court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh on Tuesday dismissed a PIL filed by former J&K CM Mehbooba Mufti seeking the transfer of undertrials—currently imprisoned in jails outside J&K—back into the Union Territory.

The division bench of Chief Justice Arun Palli and Justice Rajnesh Oswal said the petition was vague, unsubstantiated, and politically driven, and failed to meet the legal standards required for entertaining a PIL. The petitioner failed to provide specifics of affected families or prisoners, the nature of cases, or any transfer orders, the court noted.

In her petition, the PDP president had also sought an “access protocol” for weekly in-person family interviews and unrestricted privileged lawyer-client meetings, monitoring by legal services authorities, besides a proposed two-member oversight committee.

The bench held that the petition, “lacking material documents and grounded in ambiguity,” sought to invoke writ jurisdiction on incomplete and unsubstantiated facts “clearly unveiling its political undercurrents”.

The bench observed that the PIL appeared to have been initiated “for the explicit purpose of garnering political advantage,” stressing that PIL cannot be used to advance partisan agendas or convert the court into a political platform.

“Since none of the allegedly affected undertrials had approached the court even through institutional mechanisms, the bench held that Mufti, as a political leader, lacked standing to espouse their cause,” the bench noted.

The court held that a purely individual grievance concerning a prisoner’s rights cannot ordinarily be the subject of PIL.
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