India

A separate JK constitution ‘probably an aberration’, says NSA Ajit Doval

Srinagar: National Security Advisor of India Ajit Doval at a book launch on Sardar Vallabhai Patel on Tuesday said that having a separate constitution for Jammu and Kashmir was ‘probably an aberration’ and stressed on the fact that sovereignty can never be compromised.

Doval also commended the Patel for making significant contributions. He said that sovereignty cannot be ‘diluted and ill-defined’ and said that when the ‘British left, probably they did not want to leave India as a strong, sovereign state.’

He said that Patel had ‘seen through’ the plans of disintegration in the country by the British.

“His contribution is not about the merger of the states, it is only a means to an end. The thing was that to make a sovereign state in which there was the sovereignty of the people was established in the Constitution, which is applicable to the whole of it. Probably with Jammu and Kashmir, where the Constitution was…in a truncated form.. another constitution of J&K continued to exist, which is aberration,” he said.

“He (Patel) has been able to lay the foundation of a nation-state. And in nation-state, there was one law, one Constitution…Sovereignty can never be divided,” Doval said.

He said that nation building is an ‘exothermic process’ that generates a lot of heat. Unless that heat is generated it is not able to have that melting point in which all the different identities can merge and become one identity.

“Probably the heat was not sufficiently generated during our Independence movement because of the route that was taken. I am not criticising that…the non-violence was the route in which the cost of Independence was not really understood by our people,” Doval said.

His statements came at a time when the Supreme Court of India adjourned the hearing of petitions against Article 35-A in the Constitution to January next year.

This came after Jammu and Kashmir government approached the SC seeking adjournment of the hearing.

In a letter to the Registrar of the Supreme Court and circulated, M Shoeb Alam, the standing counsel for the state in the apex court, sought adjournment of hearing on five petitions scheduled for Friday, by a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

According to Intelligence reports, agencies had warned about the revolt in the police ranks in a written communication to the state government.

People across the political and regional divide have come together to protest against attempts to revoke Article 35-A of the Indian Constitution which empowers the Jammu and Kashmir state’s legislature to define “permanent residents” of the state and provide special rights and privileges to those permanent residents.

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