New Delhi, July 04: The Supreme Court will on July 11 start hearing a bunch of petitions challenging a nearly four-year-old constitutional amendment scrapping the special status of Jammu and Kashmir conferred through Article 370 and its bifurcation into two UTs.
CJI D Y Chandrachud constituted the bench comprising himself and four most senior judges – Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai and Surya Kant – which on July 11 is most likely to fix the schedule for day-to-day hearing on these petitions challenging the August 5, 2019, decision.
The five-judge bench will test the constitutional validity of the August 5 presidential order – the Constitution (Application to Jammu & Kashmir) Order, 2019 – superseding the Constitution (Application to J&K) Order, 1954, and the addition of Clause 4 to Article 367 making the Constitution applicable to J&K. Before its abrogation, Article 370 gave special status to J&K for 70 years.
IAS officer Shah Faesal withdraws his petition
IAS officer Shah Faesal, one of the petitioners has said that the matter now is a “thing of the past”. While talking to ANI over the phone, the bureaucrat said that he has withdrawn his petition challenging the Presidential Order to scrap Article 370 a long time back.
“I have withdrawn the petition in the Supreme Court challenging the Presidential Order to scrap Article 370 long ago,” he said.
Faesal was the lead petitioner challenging the abrogation of Article 370 nearly four years after it was implemented on August 5, 2019.
Faesal a 2010 batch IAS officer who topped the Civil Service Exam and posted in Jammu and Kashmir had resigned in January 2019 and floated his own party- Jammu Kashmir People’s Movement- with Shehla Rashid. Faesal’s unprecedented resignation from his own political outfit came in August 2020. The Centre rejected his resignation and he was reinstated in service.
The SC admitted the petition on August 28, 2019, just 23 days after the Centre took the decision to scrap special status for J&K, and had issued notice to the Centre and the J&K government while referring the petitions to a five-judge bench.
On March 2, 2020, a bench of Justices N V Ramana, Kaul, R Subhash Reddy, Gavai and Kant had rejected a demand from the petitioners for reference of the issue to a seven-judge bench for adjudication. The bench had to be recast following the superannuation of CJI Ramana and Justice Reddy.
A similar constitutional challenge to the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh into AP and Telangana has been pending in the SC for nine years.
