SC to deliver judgement on Monday on referring petitions on J&K to larger bench

The Supreme Court would on Monday pronounce its judgement on a plea for referring the batch of petitions against the August 5 decision by the Centre to take away the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and to reorganise it into two Union Territories, to a larger seven-judge bench.

A bench of Justices N V Ramana, Sanjay Kishan Kaul, R Subhash Reddy, B R Gavai and Surya Kant would pass its order on March 2.

The top court had on January 23 concluded its hearing on a limited point of reference. The Union government led by Attorney General K K Venugopal and Solicitor General Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta and other senior counsel, including Rajeev Dhavan, for some of the parties, had opposed it. Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association Srinagar and some others, however, sought a reference to a seven-judge bench.

The court had earlier said it would refer the Article 370 issue to a larger Constitution bench only if it was satisfied that there was a direct conflict in two earlier verdicts of the apex court which dealt with the matter.

Unless the petitioners are able to show a direct conflict between the two judgements -- Prem Nath Kaul versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1959 and Sampat Prakash versus Jammu and Kashmir in 1970 -- which dealt with the issue of Article 370, it is not going to refer the matter to a larger bench, the top court said. Both the verdicts were given by five-judge benches.

The Attorney General, for his part, contended the Prem Nath Kaul Judgment (1959) stated that on October 25, 1947, the Maharaja signed an Instrument of Accession with India which had then become an independent dominion. The Sampat Prakash Judgment (1969), on the other hand, answered the ancillary questions surrounding the operation of Article 370. He relied upon the Santosh Gupta judgment (2017), to maintain that it was thus clear that the State of Jammu and Kashmir had no vestige of sovereignty outside the Constitution of India.