New Delhi: The final hearing in the Article 370 case in the Supreme Court was marked by an affidavit from National Conference leader and Lok Sabha MP Mohammad Akbar Lone — the main petitioner in the case — in which he affirmed that he was a “responsible and dutiful citizen of the Union of India”.
Lone had been directed to furnish the affidavit by the five-judge bench led by the Chief Justice of India, at the request of an NGO representing displaced Kashmiri Pandits. The NGO had questioned Lone’s right to agitate over the issue on the grounds that he raised “pro-Pakistan” slogans inside the J&K Assembly in 2018.
Having heard the arguments from both sides, the Constitution Bench reserved its verdict Tuesday.
But while Lone was the main petitioner, he was not the only one to challenge the abrogation of Article 370 and subsequent bifurcation of J&K in court. ThePrint looks at some of the 20 other petitioners who moved the top court, including an IAS officer, a former government-appointed interlocutor, a mainstream politician who now calls himself a “muted bystander”, and an unconventional performance artist.
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Shah Faesal
A 2010 batch IAS officer of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir cadre, Shah Faesal was originally the main petitioner in the Article 370 case.
Faesal, a doctor before he joined the civil service, was among those placed under preventive detention by the J&K administration following the abrogation of Article 370 and bifurcation of the erstwhile state of J&K into two Union Territories — J&K and Ladakh. He was later booked under the Public Safety Act and spent nearly 10 months in detention.
Prior to the abrogation, Faesal had quit the civil service and launched a political outfit called the Jammu and Kashmir Peoples Movement (JKPM), but his stint in politics was short-lived. In August 2020, two months after his release from detention, he stepped down as JKPM president. He then returned to the civil service and was appointed deputy secretary in the Ministry of Culture.
Soon thereafter, he withdrew his petition in the Supreme Court, along with activist and former student leader Shehla Rashid Shora.
As a result, Lone became the main petitioner in the Article 370 case.
Breaking his silence on the issue, Faesal wrote on X in July that Article 370 “for many Kashmiris like me, is a thing of the past”. He added, “Jhelum and Ganga have merged in the great Indian Ocean for good. There is no going back. There is only marching forward.”
370, for many Kashmiris like me, is a thing of the past.
Jhelum and Ganga have merged in the great Indian Ocean for good.
There is no going back. There is only marching forward. pic.twitter.com/3cgXRWSxW0
— Shah Faesal (@shahfaesal) July 4, 2023
Radha Kumar
Academician and author Radha Kumar was one of the three interlocutors appointed for Jammu and Kashmir by the Manmohan Singh administration in 2010. Along with noted journalist Dilip Padgaonkar and Professor M.M. Ansari, she made several trips to Jammu and Kashmir to hold consultations with various stakeholders.
During one of the delegation’s visits to J&K, Kumar first courted controversy with her remarks about the need to “involve Pakistan” to find a “durable solution to the Kashmir problem”. The remarks invited sharp criticism from all quarters, including from then Union home minister P. Chidambaram, who told reporters in November 2010 that the interlocutors must refrain from giving a “ball-by-ball commentary” about their dialogue.
A year later, Kumar asked to be relieved from her duties after fellow interlocutor Professor Ansari criticised her for attending a conference on Kashmir in Brussels in 2016 organised by individuals with alleged ties to Pakistan’s ISI. Kumar later withdrew her resignation after she was reportedly told that Chidambaram had refused to accept it.
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J&K People’s Conference
The J&K-based party, led by separatist-turned-mainstream politician Sajad Lone, also challenged the abrogation and bifurcation in the Supreme Court.
Sajad’s father Abdul Ghani Lone, a three-time MLA and later separatist leader, was assassinated at a rally in Srinagar in 2002. Seven years later, Sajad joined mainstream politics. He was made a minister in the BJP-PDP government formed in 2015 with Mufti Mohammad Sayeed as chief minister.
After the coalition broke in 2018, Sajad — who was among the two Peoples’ Conference MLAs elected to the assembly in 2014 — wrote to the governor to stake claim to form a government with the “support of the BJP” and “more than 18” other MLAs. His request came hours after the Mehbooba Mufti-led PDP, the National Conference, and the Congress claimed that they had the numbers to form a government. The governor, in turn, dissolved the assembly, citing “extensive horse-trading” among other issues.
While Sajad served nearly a year in preventive detention following the abrogation of Article 370, his detractors claim he is “close to the BJP”. Refuting such claims, Sajad had in an interview with ThePrint last November said, “It’s difficult to ally with them (BJP) after what they have done.” In his bio on X, Sajad now refers to himself as a “muted bystander”.
M.Y. Tarigami
The 76-year-old Communist Party of India (Marxist) was among the leaders placed in preventive detention in the aftermath of the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019.
In Kashmir, where regional parties had dominated the political landscape since 1996, Tarigami was the only CPI(M) MLA to be elected to the legislative assembly in 2014. Despite the odds, he retained his seat of Kulgam, which had witnessed many spates of unrest over the years.
Tarigami is no stranger to confrontations with the State. When he was just 18 years old, he sat on a hunger strike at Anantnag Degree College to demand an increase in the college’s intake capacity.
Later, it was his opposition to the 1975 Indira-Sheikh Accord that landed the Communist leader in jail. “We opposed the accord and wanted the people of J&K to be given the right to self-determination,” his party colleague Ghulam Nabi Malik had told ThePrint in December 2020. Tarigami was also booked under the Public Safety Act in 1979 after riots erupted in Kashmir in the days following the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan.
The CPI(M) leader is currently convener and spokesperson of the Gupkar alliance — an umbrella grouping of various J&K-based parties demanding the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status.
Inder Salim
Inder Salim, or Inder Ji Tickoo as he is known, is a performance artist known for his bold and sometimes politically charged performances. Born in Kashmir, he took refuge in New Delhi during the peak of militancy in J&K.
In 2002, he staged a performance to protest the pollution in the Yamuna river. During the performance — titled ‘Dialogue With Power Plant, Shrill Across A Dead River’ — Salim chopped off the little finger from his left hand and hurled it into the river to “build a bridge” between himself and the “dead river”.
In an opinion piece for Open magazine in 2009, Salim expressed his views about that performance: “They call me crazy. But I call it art.”
According to an Indian Express report from 2015, he once took part in a poetry event, unclothed, and with his “penis stitched surgically to his navel”.
The report also quoted artist Amitesh Grover recalling Salim’s performance at KhojLive 2012 for which the audience was asked to stand around a platform of turmeric. Salim then “sprang up, piercing through the turmeric grave, with torn pages from the Constitution of India in his mouth, eating, reciting, chewing, dribbling, sputtering”, Grover told the paper. This performance was reportedly meant to protest a British-era law that empowered the State to censor artists.
J&K HC Bar Association
Run by an ad-hoc committee for three years now, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association has had its fair share of controversies.
Internal elections to the bar council were halted in 2020 — the first time in two decades — after the J&K administration booked its president Mian Abdul Qayoom under the Public Safety Act in the aftermath of the abrogation. The Srinagar-based outfit was then asked to clarify whether it considered Kashmir a “dispute” as stated in the bar council’s constitution.
In July this year, the J&K administration barred the elections again, citing an “emergent situation which can lead to breach of peace and disruption of public order”.
Kumari Vijayalakshmi Jha
Lawyer Kumari Vijayalakshmi Jha was an Article 370 petitioner well before the abrogation took place.
It was in response to a petition from her that the Supreme Court in 2018 had ruled that Article 370 was “not a temporary provision”, despite its headnote.
Jha had at the time moved the top court against a Delhi High Court order, which dismissed her 2017 plea seeking “to declare Article 370 of the Constitution of India a temporary provision which has lapsed with the dissolution of the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly”.
She had also argued that the Constitution of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir be declared void.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)