TheEconomistOctober 5th 2019 311T
wo monthsago Narendra Modi, India’s
prime minister, boldly scrapped seven
decades of legal precedent. Voiding Jammu
& Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, his
government abolished its legislature,
sliced the state in two and demoted the
new parts to “union territories”, subject to
direct rule by the national government in
Delhi. The move prompted cheers in much
of India, and fury in the former state. It
also, inevitably, raised pressing constitu-
tional questions.
But pressing to whom? The 7m people of
the Kashmir valley certainly feel some ur-
gency. Since August 5th this overwhelm-
ingly Muslim slice of the state has been un-
der virtual siege, painfully squeezed
between some 500,000 itchy-fingered In-
dian troops and a few hundred armed mili-
tants. Wielding draconian anti-terror laws,
the government has arrested hundreds,
not for any crime but to prevent protests. It
has also restricted movement into, out of
and around the state and imposed a total
block on mobile phones and the internet.
Militants and their supporters are enforc-
ing their own blockade in response, forcing
schools, shops and markets to close in an
open-ended protest strike. “It is suffocat-
ing and unbearable,” says a Kashmiri civil
servant who is opting to stay with relatives
in Delhi. “Young people especially are go-
ing crazy, with nothing to do except dream
of revenge.”
To the Supreme Court, however, none of
this seems particularly urgent. When it
met in late August to consider a batch of pe-
titions challenging the constitutionality of
Mr Modi’s moves, it gave the government amonth to reply. When the judges took the
matter up again on October 1st, the govern-
ment’s lawyers received not even a tap on
the wrist for failing to prepare a response.
Instead, the judges graciously yielded
more time. The next scheduled hearing is
now set for mid-November, which is to say,
two weeks after the Jammu & Kashmir Re-
organisation Act is due to come into force,
on October 31st.
With equal unconcern, another bench
of the Supreme Court on the same day post-
poned—for the seventh time in one
case—an even bigger batch of petitions re-
garding unfair imprisonment and suspen-
sion of communications. It has shunted
petitions for habeas corpus—which in legal
theory are urgent matters—back to the
high court in Jammu & Kashmir, in full
knowledge that it has been swamped by
more than 250 such protests against illegal
detention, yet has only two judges to hear
them all. The reason why the state’s top
court is so cripplingly undermanned, with
eight of its 17 judgeships vacant, is that the
Supreme Court has for months neglected
to ratify any new appointments for the
state. (Lawyers in Kashmir are also on
strike, to protest arbitrary arrests.)
The Supreme Court has at times stood
up to the government, through rulings that
expanded the public right to information,
for instance, or strengthened ordinary citi-
zens’ right to privacy. Legal experts concur,
however, that this record has notably dark-India’s courts and Kashmir
State of disgrace
DELHI
The judiciary seems determined to ignore the government’s abuses
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