Jammu And Kashmir: Emergence Of A New India

The air around the country is rife with the news of the scrapped law that till now granted special status to Indian-administered Kashmir.
So what is the Article 370 all about? To understand it better we need to take a tour of our past history. From 1846 till 1947, Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state of the British Empire in India and was ruled by the Jamwal Rajput Dogra Dynasty. At the time of Independence, India comprised of more than 500 princely states and provinces, which under the British supervision were divided during the partition of India and Pakistan. Bengal was literally sliced into two with the eastern part of Bengal becoming East Pakistan while the West Bengal remained within the Indian Territory. Punjab also went through the same painful process with west Punjab becoming part Pakistan while the eastern Punjab remained within the Indian Territory. The province of Bombay was divided into two, the Bombay and the Sindh province with the latter becoming part of Pakistan. The story did not end here. Shortly after the partition, some Pakistani soldiers known as Razakar which in Urdu literally means "volunteer" invaded Jammu and Kashmir in October 1947, attempting to capture and forcibly annex Kashmir with Pakistan. These infiltrators were intercepted by the Indian Army at Patan and forced to retreat their steps back. The existing monarch of Kashmir signed an Instrument of Accession with India and officially became a part of the Indian Union, but some areas were still held by the Pakistanis which till today is known as the Pakistan occupied Kashmir, a disputed territory. This did not stop here the Razakars also resisted the integration of Hyderabad state into the Indian Union. The Nizam however did not want to either join Pakistan nor India and wanted to remain independent. The Razakars were routed during Operation Polo and their leader Qasim Rizvi who wanted the Nizam to accede his princely state to Pakistan was jailed and later allowed to move to Pakistan where he was granted asylum. On the 29th of November the Nizam finally entered into an agreement and thus Hyderabad became a part of the Indian Union.
By 1950, most states became part of the Indian Union and the reorganization of the states was completed by 1956.
However, the accession of Jammu and Kashmir was different from the rest of other states. Article 370 of the Indian constitution gave special status and treatment to Jammu and Kashmir and its citizens. This was signed between Hari Singh, Lord Mountbatten and Pandit Nehru. The Article gave the state its separate constitution, a flag of its own and various other concessions. Nehru had promised that this Article is only a temporary provision and it would get eroded over a period of time, but that never happened, till on the 5th of August under the leadership of Shri Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, made the historic announcement in the parliament that the President of India had signed a decree abolishing the Article 370 of the constitution, stripping the seven decades of autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir had enjoyed. The bill was passed in both houses of the parliament amidst majority voting in its favor.

By: Madhuchanda Saxena
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/kashmir-special-status-explained-articles-370-35a-190805054643431.html