NEW DELHI—On Dec. 11, India’s Supreme Court upheld a 2019 Indian government decision revoking special status for the former state of Jammu and Kashmir. The move strengthens Prime Minister Narendra Modi and is in India’s geopolitical interest, experts say.
Four years ago, India split the former state of Jammu and Kashmir into two federally governed territories—one, Jammu-Kashmir, bordering Pakistan, and the other, Ladakh, bordering China.
The landlocked territory was acceded wholly to India. However, as a consequence of wars and border disputes, by 1962, it had been divided into three regions, one administered by India, one by Pakistan, and one by China.
Incidentally, in the 19th century, the region—then a kingdom in a strategic alliance with Britain—was the meeting point for the British, Russian, and Chinese empires.
Thus, when the Indian government, led by Mr. Modi, politically reorganized the strategically sensitive state by passing the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act in 2019, Pakistan opposed the abolition of Article 370. In turn, China opposed the new federal identity of Ladakh as “unacceptable,” because it controls certain territory in the region that India claims under the 1947 accession treaty.
Within India, the abrogation led to a louder political debate between the opposition parties and the ruling party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP had made a campaign promise to end Article 370. Immediately after the reorganization, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC), a regional political party, petitioned India’s Supreme Court challenging the abrogation. The JKNC sought a direction from the apex court to declare the reorganization “unconstitutional, void and inoperative.”
The Dec. 11 verdict went against the JKNC petition, which deemed Article 370 a temporary provision of the Indian constitution. Mr. Modi called the verdict “historic” and said the apex court’s decision had “fortified the very essence of unity” among all Indians.
“It is a resounding declaration of hope, progress and unity for our sisters and brothers in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh,” Mr. Modi wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Harsh V. Pant, a professor of international relations in the Defence Studies Department and the India Institute at King’s College London, described the verdict as a “very big victory” for Mr. Modi, who, he said, had been “often castigated since 2019 when this measure was taken.”
According to Mr. Pant, Mr. Modi was criticized for what was portrayed as an “anti-minority” move, as the demographic of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir was more than 68 percent Muslim, a community that is a minority in the overall Indian demography.
“From the Supreme Court’s decision, it’s very clear that there’s a larger aspect in mind here. It wasn’t taken with [a] blatantly bipartisan approach,” Mr. Pant told The Epoch Times over the phone.
Geopolitical Implications
Experts told The Epoch Times that the 2019 decision on the reorganization of Jammu and Kashmir was geo-strategically significant for India and that the Supreme Court’s verdict has strengthened India’s case.Satoru Nagao, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, told The Epoch Times the 2019 abrogation of Article 370 and reorganization of Jammu and Kashmir happened as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was being finalized.
“Indeed, [the] situation in Kashmir is linked with the situation in Afghanistan. Terrorism-related fatalities in India-controlled Kashmir rose just after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan [1988–1989] and started to decline when the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan [2001] started,” the Tokyo-based Mr. Nagao said.
Pakistan was diverting Islamic extremists from Afghanistan to the state of Jammu and Kashmir, Mr. Nagao said, and it was expected that if the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, terrorism in the region would again increase.
“India needed drastic measures to deter such a situation. During this time, China’s incursions had also increased along the Ladakh front line. Thus, to deal with both Pakistan-supported terrorist[s] and China, India needed to divide the state of Jammu and Kashmir,” Mr. Nagao said.
Once the region was under the direct control of the federal government, Indian armed forces could rapidly strengthen its defense as well as maintain law and order, he said.
Meanwhile, on Dec. 6, the Indian Parliament passed another bill, the Jammu and Kashmir Reservation Bill of 2023, that provides job and education quotas for socially marginalized and educationally backward communities of the erstwhile state. In addition, the bill stipulated 24 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir state assembly for Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a Dec. 7 media briefing, called the new bills a “farce” and described the region as an “internationally-recognized disputed territory.”
Mr. Pant said that although the court verdict and the new reservation bill will strengthen Mr. Modi and his party, they will make Pakistan “irrelevant” in conversations related to Jammu and Kashmir.
Going Forward
In its verdict, the Supreme Court directed the Indian government to hold elections in Jammu and Kashmir by September of next year and to restore statehood “as soon as possible.” That means that the region will remain bifurcated into Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, but Jammu and Kashmir will likely become a state with its own elected representatives, rather than direct federal governance.Bharat Wakhlu is a Kashmiri with more than four decades of corporate leadership experience in India and the United States who has authored multiple books, including a novel set in Kashmir. Mr. Wakhlu told The Epoch Times that the recent developments will encourage improved governance, better engagement with the region’s people through their representatives, and a climate that will attract investment.
“Clean politics is about serving the needs of any region. Elected representatives rely on an ecosystem of good governance, whereby they can facilitate meeting the aspirations of the people,” he said, adding that the political developments will discourage the terrorist ecosystem backed by Pakistan and China from across the region’s borders.
In a critical response to the verdict, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said, “This is a dispute left from the past between India and Pakistan, and it should be properly addressed through peaceful means, according to the U.N. charter, United Nations Security Council resolutions, and relevant bilateral agreements.”
Meanwhile, Pakistan said the Indian court’s decision has “no legal value” and asserted that international law doesn’t recognize what it termed New Delhi’s “unilateral and illegal actions” of 2019.
Mr. Wakhlu said that China, an errant violator of international rule-based order, views India as a rival. Beijing is envious of India’s rise, he said, all the more because it’s a democracy that can challenge the communist regime’s expansionist policies.
“Geopolitics is neither entirely clean nor fully rules-based. China and Pakistan don’t want India to rise, and they have all along endeavored to turn Kashmir into a perpetual, [resource-draining] problem for India,” he said.
During arguments in the Supreme Court, the Indian government repeatedly said that Article 370 was detrimental to promoting the rights of all, crimping the ability of the state to attend to the needs of its people and thwarting “development and progress” in the region. Since the abrogation, investments have started to increase in the region. The government said that since the 2019 reorganization, it has received proposals worth more than $10 billion across 42 industrial sectors.
“Until August 5, 2019, the rules of India, including those pertaining to business and commerce, didn’t apply to Kashmir,” Mr. Wakhlu said, adding that the recent developments will go a long way toward putting the resource-rich, picturesque region on the business map of the world. “No investor in his right mind would want to invest in a place with no guaranteed governance and with persisting terrorism.”
