Sehar Iqbal in Phenomenal World:
On August 5, 2019, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah presented the draft of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Reorganization Bill in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. The bill threatened to permanently alter the legal, political, and economic status of the state, sparking widespread outrage in the region and across the world. As Yamini Aiyar of the Hindustan Times commented:
The undemocratic manner in which the J&K reorganization bill was passed in Parliament, the silencing of voices of those affected by these actions, and the unprecedented move to convert a recognised state into a Union Territory (UT) —mark a rupture in India’s federal trajectory. India is now firmly on the path to centralisation of power and may well be inching toward transforming into a unitary rather than federal state.1
The bill proposed revoking the state’s constitutional autonomy, downgrading it to an Indian Union territory directly administered by the Indian government, and opening its international legal status to dispute. Most importantly, it abrogated Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which in 1949 gave Jammu and Kashmir “special status,” including measures of autonomy from the Indian union government and the ability to grant special employment and land ownership privileges to permanent residents.
The right-wing ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used its majority to force through the bill in both houses of Parliament. On August 6, a day following the bill’s presentation, Article 370 was repealed by Presidential order. The move was widely considered illegal by constitutional experts and the Indian Supreme Court and lacked support from J&K’s elected state government—a coalition led by the local People’s Democratic Party—which itself was dismissed by Presidential decree in June 2019. Preempting resistance in what has been the site of continuous armed insurgency against Indian rule since 1988, Shah added 35,000 armed forces to the existing 308,000 stationed in J&K.
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