A close-up photograph of a man's face partially obscured by tangled and rusted barbed wire as he stare through the gaps. The background is slightly blurred, with hints of a green and white flag visible behind him.
A man covers his head with barbed wire at a protest in Srinagar against the revocation of Article 370 in 2019. Aman Hingorani’s book reflects a statist interpretation of Kashmir, wherein legal frameworks are to be leveraged to systematically erase the Kashmiri people from the narrative.IMAGO / ZUMA Press Wire

The paradox of Indian liberal thought on Kashmir and Article 370

Aman Hingorani’s ‘Unravelling the Kashmir Knot’ is emblematic of Indian liberals’ depoliticisation of Kashmir, mirroring the Bharatiya Janata Party’s justification for abrogating Article 370

Burhan Majid is a legal scholar and a doctoral fellow at NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad. He is a recipient of the Indian Equality Law Fellowship 2022 (University of Oxford) and VRU-WCL Short-Term Fellowship 2023 (Humboldt University, Berlin).

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DURING A TELEVISION interview with India Today in December 2023, the late jurist Fali Sam Nariman, one of the country’s more prominent liberal voices, defended the Supreme Court of India’s verdict that month endorsing the abrogation of Article 370 – the part of the Indian constitution that recognised Jammu and Kashmir’s special, semi-autonomous status within the Indian Union, which the Indian government had done away with in 2019. The move also entailed stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its statehood.

According to Nariman, the appropriate procedure for the government to effect the abrogation should have been through Article 368, which outlines the process for constitutional amendments. The government, under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had forced the move through unilaterally via a presidential order under Article 370 itself, and then enforced its will in Kashmir with a brutal lockdown and internet blackout.

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