Upholding the Centre’s decision to scrap Jammu and Kashmir’s special status, a five-judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court validated the Parliament’s power to make changes to Article 370 and clearly rejected the argument that the erstwhile state ever had the exceptionalism of “internal sovereignty”. A significant verdict, by all means, as it provides a firm judicial ground for the long process of J&K’s constitutional integration into India’s federal structure and placing it as an ordinary territorial unit of India’s national sovereignty.
Along with this crucial part of the judgement, the court accepted the government’s promise of restoring statehood to Jammu and Kashmir, and set September 30 as the deadline for conducting assembly polls. All these aspects of the verdict, the key part as well as the adjunct, touch upon some larger aspects of the constitutional edifice, its evolving philosophy as a living document, and most significantly, apply the judicial prism to see India’s federal polity as a subtext to the the larger national architecture.
