The Supreme Court of India has established a new Constitution bench to address a series of nearly 23 petitions challenging the central government’s decision to repeal Article 370, which previously granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir. The bench, led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud, includes Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai, and Surya Kant. The hearings are set to commence on July 11, 2023.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!This move by the court comes almost four years after the former state of Jammu and Kashmir was restructured into two Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh on August 5, 2019. The case is scheduled for directions on July 11, when the court is anticipated to issue procedural orders to set a future hearing date.
Among the petitioners is Shah Faesal, a bureaucrat who initially challenged the abrogation of Article 370 but later filed a request to withdraw his petition. Faesal resigned from service in protest in 2019 to establish a political party in J&K. However, his resignation was not accepted by the government, and he later withdrew it.
Faesal’s decision to withdraw the petition followed his reappointment into the Indian Administrative Service in April 2022 as deputy secretary in the Union ministry of culture. In his plea filed on April 29, 2022, Faesal informed the court that he no longer wished to be part of a petition questioning the Centre’s decision to end the special status of J&K, as he wanted to pursue public service without the baggage of political activism.
Previously, on April 25 and September 23 of the last year, a Constitution Bench headed by then CJI NV Ramana agreed to list for hearing the pleas challenging the Centre’s decision to abrogate provisions of Article 370. They were referred to it by erstwhile CJI Ranjan Gogoi. However, the apex court now needs to reconstitute a five-judge bench to hear the pleas as ex-CJI Ramana and Justice R Subhash Reddy, who were part of the earlier Constitution Bench that had heard the pleas, have now retired.
The petitions challenging the abrogation of Article 370 were first listed after March 2, 2020. The hearings on the Article 370 cases began before the 5-judge bench in December 2019, nearly 4 months after the notifications issued by the Centre in August 2019. A preliminary issue arose in the case as to whether a reference to a 7-judge bench was necessary in light of alleged divergence in the opinions expressed by two coordinate benches of the Supreme Court in the cases of Prem Nath Kaul and Sampath Prakash. By a judgment dated March 2, 2020, the Constitution Bench held that there was no need to refer the matter to a larger Bench.
The matter was not listed again until now. In April 2022, then CJI NV Ramana had not expressed anything definite when the matter was sought to be listed. In September 2022, then CJI UU Lalit had agreed to list the petitions. After his tenure ended, the matter was again mentioned on two separate occasions before the present CJI DY Chandrachud, who expressed his inclination on listing the matter. Of the previous bench which heard the matter, Justices NV Ramana and Subhash Reddy have retired. CJI DY Chandrachud and Justice Sanjiv Khanna are the new members of the latest bench.