Supreme Court: India's statute, not J&K's, let Parliament make laws for J&K

 A five-judge Supreme Court bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai and Surya Kant on Tuesday ordered the conclusion of arguments on scrapping Article 370 and bifurcating J&K into two UTs in 2019 after hearing rejoinders from petitioners' counsel Kapil Sibal, Gopal Subramaniam, Rajeev Dhawan, Zaffar Mohd Shah and Dushyant Dave.

The Centre and supporters of the decision in many intervenors through attorney general R Venkataramani, solicitor general Tushar Mehta, senior advocates Harish Salve, Rakesh Dwivedi, V

Giri, Mahesh Jethmalani and Guru Krishna Kumar and others took just five and a half days to elaborate the validly exercised power to skeletonise Article 370 to make J&K's integration with India complete and its bifurcation to preserve territorial integrity.

To a query from the bench, the Union government had informed the court that it was ready to conduct assembly elections for J&K UT and detailed the commencement of the process by first putting in place people's representatives at the grassroots-level democratic institutions. "We are ready to hold elections to the J&K UT assembly at any time and that a call in that regard would have to be taken by the state and central Election Commissions," the SG had informed the SC.

However, Mehta had said that though it is a solemn promise of the Union government to the Parliament to restore statehood to J&K UT, it would take some time till the goal of bringing normalcy to the decades-long terrorism affected erstwhile state is achieved. The government had also indicated that Ladakh would continue to remain a UT even after J&K gets back statehood .

On Tuesday, National Conference MP Mohammad Akbar Lone's counsel Sibal cited certain letters exchanged between Sardar Vallavbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru and N Gopalaswami Ayyangar to make a startling claim that Patel "was the architect of Article 370". The CJI asked Sibal to read another letter where Patel appears to have expressed his serious reservations on giving special status to J&K under Article 370, a letter which was highlighted by Mehta, who did the bulk of arguments for the Union government.

The SC had, throughout the hearing, maintained that the Indian Constitution was supreme, J&K was an integral part of India, and that its Constitution was subordinate to that of India. On Tuesday it said, "The power to apply provisions of the Indian Constitution to J&K is found in the Constitution of India and not in the J&K Constitution. The domain of Parliament to make laws for J&K is found in the Indian Constitution and not in that of J&K."

(Courtesy:- The Times of India, 6 September 2023)