If the government of Narendra Modi can follow through on its plan, Kashmir will cease to be an autonomous state within India. The abolition of Article 370 has long been a staple of the Hindu nationalist BJP’s political platform. In its 2014 election manifesto, the BJP repeated its old ambition of getting rid of the article, but promised to “discuss this with all stakeholders.” That commitment to consultation vanished in its 2019 manifesto. With another clear-cut majority in Parliament, the party is emboldened to make good on its electoral promise.
Article 370 governed India’s relations with its only Muslim-majority state. The article had limited the application of India’s constitution in Jammu and Kashmir and also prevented non-Kashmiris from easily becoming permanent residents of the state. Its abrogation upends the status quo in the disputed territory and will lead to a major transformation of conditions on the ground.
The articles that preserved Kashmir’s special status predate Indian independence and hark back to the time when Kashmir was a nominally independent princely state. In 1927, Maharaja Hari Singh, the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, passed an ordinance that prohibited non-Kashmiris from acquiring property in the state. This move was precipitated by an influx of people from the neighboring state of Punjab. Twenty years later, when the maharaja chose to join his princely realm to the newly created state of India, Jammu and Kashmir’s new constituent assembly chose to keep a variant of this provision.
The retention of this colonial-era provision was not surprising. The maharaja had acceded to India under duress when Pakistan-supported irregulars threatened to overrun his realm. Given that a Muslim-majority state was about to accede to a secular but Hindu-majority country, India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was prepared to grant Kashmir a special status under the Indian constitution. Article 370 limited the areas in which the Indian constitution would apply to Jammu and Kashmir and allowed the state a degree of autonomy no other Indian state possessed. Though designated as temporary, Article 370 became a permanent feature of the constitution and was last confirmed by presidential order in 1954.
www.foreignaffairs.c...on-kashmir