Hearing on Article 370: Supreme Court will hear on July 11 a batch of pleas challenging the scrapping of Article 370 from the Constitution, which gave special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir.
A five-judge constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud will take up the matter, nearly four years after the Centre struck down Article 370 introducing a Bill in the Parliament in August 2019.
According to a notice issued on the apex court website on Monday (July 3), the bench comprising Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai and Surya Kant will hear the pleas, including the one filed by IAS officer Shah Faesal and others.
Faesal was the first Kashmiri to have topped the all-India civil services examination in 2010. He was detained for more than a year after the abrogation of Article 370. Following the move, he had stepped down from his post and launched Jammu Kashmir People’s Movement, a political entity in January 2019.
However, the government did not accept his resignation and posted him to the Union Culture Ministry. He had also moved a petition in the Supreme Court against the government’s decision on Article 370.
The Centre had bifurcated the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories on August 5, 2019.
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Petitions against Article 370 abrogation
Several petitions challenging the Centre's decision to abrogate the provisions of Article 370 and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, which split J-K into two Union Territories Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh were referred to a constitution bench in 2019.
The special status of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked after the abrogation of Article 370.
People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), a prominent NGO, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association, and an intervenor had earlier sought that the matter be referred to a larger bench on grounds that two judgements of the apex court -- Prem Nath Kaul versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1959 and Sampat Prakash versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1970 -- which dealt with the issue of Article 370 conflicted with each other and therefore, the current bench of five judges could not hear the issue.
The top court had disagreed with the petitioners and ruled in 2020 that it was of the opinion that "there is no conflict between the judgements" and the issue will be heard by the five-judge bench.
In April 2022, the government accepted Faesal's application for withdrawing his resignation from service and reinstated him.
Faesal had in April last year filed an application seeking the deletion of his name from the list of seven petitioners who have challenged the scrapping of Article 370 of the Constitution.
Other petitioners
Other petitioners in the matter are Javid Ahmad Bhat, Shehla Rashid Shora, Ilyas Laway, Saif Ali Khan and Rohit Sharma and Mohammad Hussain Padder.
Advocate-on-Record Aakarsh Kamra, who has filed the plea on behalf of Faesal and others, said besides the IAS officer, Rashid has also filed an application seeking the deletion of her name from the list of petitioners.
(With PTI inputs)
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