Difficult to say that Article 370 cannot be amended, observes Supreme Court

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Supreme Court verbally observed on Thursday that the moot question over the abrogation of Article 370 which needed to be decided was whether the process followed was flawed or not. It will be difficult to say that Article 370, which gave special status to Jammu & Kashmir, cannot be amended, a five-member constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud observed.

Speaking for the bench, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said the «state (J&K) assembly could have also said that let all provisions of the Constitution apply to J&K using Article 370… except 370 remains a skeleton, everything applies». He added: «Even now, in the sense, Article 370 is not removed… whatever was there in Article 370 has been removed using the machinery of Article 370 itself.» According to the CJI, it was clear that there was no conditional surrender of sovereignty of J&K with India.

The integration of J&K with India is «absolute and complete in every which way,» he said. The only question which remained in a limited sense was if Parliament could exercise the power, the CJI said, observing that in case of any other state besides J&K, there are restraints on the power of Parliament to make laws for subjects on the state lists.

Distribution of legislative powers does not impact sovereignty of India, he said, adding also that the «concurrence with the state is not something unique to Jammu and Kashmir». Referring to Article 248, the CJI said: «Parliament can make laws even on an area which is in state list only.

But it requires concurrence with the state… But this does not impact the sovereignty of the Union.» Justice Sanjiv Khanna reiterated his remark that Article 370 was «meant to be a flexible» Article. He went on to question the