https://thewire.in/law/the-last-pillar-of-indian-democracy-has-fallen
the Supreme Court has opened the way for his or any future government to amend the Constitution without having to bother with getting a two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament.
To justify its decision, the bench has put forward two other supporting arguments. The first is that Article 370 was placed in part 21 of the Constitution titled “Temporary, Transitional and Special Provisions”. Thus it was never meant to be permanent. So all that the Modi government has done is to close the chapter on Kashmir.
The second is that over the decades since the accession, Kashmir’s laws have in any case been brought in line progressively with those of the rest of India. So as the government has argued, the autonomy shielded by Article 370 had been been ‘gradually eroded’.
What the Supreme Court has chosen to ignore is that all this was done with the consent of the Kashmir governments of the time. Sheikh Abdullah had signed the Delhi agreement only after convening a constituent Assembly with 75 members, to approve of it. In the decades that followed, more and more all-India laws and provisions were extended to Kashmir as well with the full consent, often at the request of, the Kashmir government. As Sheikh Abdullah’s talks with Indira Gandhi’s special representative, G. Parthasarathy, before returning to power showed, there was next to nothing left that he wanted to change.
This process was a world away from the sleight of hand that the Modi government used in 2019, to ‘complete’ the integration. The contrast between ‘erosion by consent’ and ‘erosion through brute force’ was vividly demonstrated by the weeks-long curfews, the complete shut down of internet services, and the paralysis of transport even afterwards that forced people catching flights out of Kashmir to walk kilometres to get to the airport. For the Supreme Court to have glossed over this stark and humiliating difference is inexcusable.