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Critically analyse the Supreme Court’s ruling on the abrogation of Article 370 (2023).

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When analysing Art. 370: (1) Temporary provision, (2) Presidential modification powers, (3) Role of Constituent Assembly, (4) Federalism implications.
Updated On: Jul 10, 2026
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Approach Solution - 1

Three ideas run through the 2023 ruling on Article 370, and each carries its own weight in the final assessment.

The first is temporariness. The Article sits under the constitutional heading 'Temporary, Transitional and Special Provisions', and the Court read that heading as decisive: whatever autonomy Article 370 gave Jammu and Kashmir was never meant to outlast the process of integration it was designed to manage. Once that process was complete, the provision had done its job.

The second is the source of the President's power. Article 370(3) lets the President declare the Article inoperative on the recommendation of the State's Constituent Assembly. That Assembly dissolved itself in 1957 without giving such a recommendation, yet the Court held that the President's power under Article 370(3) survived the Assembly's disappearance, since the proviso requiring its recommendation was one route for exercising the power, not a condition that could freeze the power forever.

The third, and most contested, is who could stand in for the Assembly once it was gone. The Court accepted that Parliament, acting for the State Legislature during President's Rule, could give the recommendation instead. This draws the sharpest criticism, because a State Legislature elected by the people of Jammu and Kashmir is not the same body, in composition or mandate, as Parliament exercising delegated power while the State had no government of its own.

Put these three ideas together and the picture is a judgment that is internally consistent on constitutional text but institutionally troubling in what it permits for the future: any State under President's Rule could, in principle, see its special constitutional arrangements altered without its own elected voice being heard.

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Approach Solution -2

Article 370's story helps explain why the 2023 judgment reads the way it does, so it is worth tracing the timeline before judging the outcome.

1947 to 1954: the bridge is built
Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India in 1947 on terms narrower than other princely States, and Article 370 was drafted to formalise that narrower relationship: the State kept its own Constitution, and Union laws applied to it only through Presidential Orders issued with the concurrence of the State government. The Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 1954 extended most other constitutional provisions to the State through this exact mechanism.

1957: the Constituent Assembly disappears
The J&K Constituent Assembly, the body meant to eventually recommend whether Article 370 should end, dissolved after finishing its own work without making that recommendation. For six decades this created a real doubt: had the power under Article 370(3) become impossible to use, since the body meant to trigger it no longer existed, or did the power simply pass to whoever performed the Assembly's functions afterward.

2019: the Union acts
Using President's Rule then in force in the State, the President issued the relevant Constitutional Orders, and Parliament, acting for the State Legislature, gave the concurrence that Article 370(3) required. Article 370 was declared inoperative and the State was reorganised into the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

2023: the Court closes the loop
The Supreme Court upheld this entire chain of steps. It held that the President's power under Article 370(3) had never lapsed, that Parliament could validly stand in for the State Legislature during President's Rule, and that the reorganisation itself did not, on the facts of Ladakh, exceed constitutional limits.

Seen across this timeline, the 2023 decision is less a bold new departure than the final step in a sequence the Union had been building toward since 2019, and its real significance lies in confirming that a dissolved Constituent Assembly does not permanently freeze a Presidential power, even when the recommending body that power was designed around no longer exists.

\[ \boxed{\text{The ruling closes six decades of doubt by holding that Article 370 was always subject to Presidential termination, dissolved Assembly notwithstanding.}} \]
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