Bengaluru: A 11 December 2023 Supreme Court verdict confirming the end of special constitutional privileges to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) “glosses over many legal explanation and is full of ambiguities”, according to Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of The Kashmir Times, one of the former state’s oldest English newspapers and author of a book on the subject.

“It is a classic case of ‘If you can’t convince them, confuse them,’” said Bhasin, 55.

The Supreme Court of India held that J&K had no claim to sovereignty, only “asymmetric federalism”, after accession to India in 1947, the J&K Constitution was redundant, and that there was no prima facie case that the union government’s abrogation of Article 370 on 5 August 2019 via the President’s orders was “malafide” or an “extraneous exercise of power”.

A five-judge Constitution bench of Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and Justices S K Kaul, Sanjeev Khanna, B R Gavai and Surya Kant said the reorganisation of J&K into the union territories of J&K and Ladakh was valid but temporary and ordered the union government to restore statehood and hold state elections by 30 September 2024.

Bhasin said the Supreme Court had “let down the people of J&K”.

The judgement, delivered even as local politicians and former chief ministers were locked up at home—which the J&K government denied—said that constitutional order 272, which the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi used in August 2019 to change the definition of the J&K Constituent assembly to a legislative assembly, was invalid but that it made no difference since the Supreme Court held that the President did not need a recommendation from the Constituent assembly.

Bhasin said that even before the verdict, the government had been creating grounds for irreversible changes. “New laws, especially those related to lands & jobs, signal that the decks have been cleared for gradually changing [J&K’s] Muslim-majority status,” she said.

“When everything else fails in a democracy, we look up to the court,” said Bhasin, a journalist for more than three decades and now a John S Knight fellow at Stanford University in the US. “So, there were some expectations from the court.”

When the J&K government suspended the Internet for more than 500 days, the longest shutdown reported in a democracy, it was Bhasin’s petition before the Supreme Court that led to a January 2022 ruling that the right to freedom of expression included a right to use the Internet.

In October 2020, the J&K government sealed the State-allotted Srinagar office of The Kashmir Times, which was started in 1955 by her father Ved Bhasin and over the years has been a target for both militant groups and the State, which stopped advertisements to the newspaper in 2010.

Bhasin questioned the Supreme Court’s view that the abrogation of Article 370 was valid because it was not malafide.

This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here .