Article 370 Case Hearing : Live Updates From Supreme Court [Day 16]

Dhavan: Art 3 has a mandatory provision that you must circulate any bill for reorganization to that legislature. This is a mandatory provision.

Dhavan: It was stated that socialism and secularism is not recognised in J&K. It's actually present in the J&K constitution. Come to Section 13.

Dhavan: That is the process of constitution making - to accomodate a large number of views and come to a compromise.

Dhavan: Any compromises in the Constitution follow from an important insight of Fali Nariman- if today we were asked to make a constitution, we would not succeed...Israel was never able to come to terms with a constitution because it never was able to evolve a compromise.

Dhavan: The most important compromise of all concerned the privy purses.

Dhavan: 370 is a compromise. You will find many compromises in constitution. Take for eg Art 25, Sikhs are allowed to carry their daggers. You want to get rid of that? You'll have to have a constitutional amendment. This is a compromise. The entire 6th schedule is a compromise.

Dhavan: The second was to fulfill its task of making a constitution. This was fulfilled in 1956. After that 370 ceases to be a temporary provision.

Dhavan: To make it a balanced cooperative federalism- we find the words concurrence, consultation, recommend. These are methods of cooperation in a cooperative federalism-and they're writ large in sixth schedule.

Dhavan: What were the conditionalities available at far as 370 is concerned? There are two sets of powers assigned to Constituent Assembly - first, to reject the Constitution making process completely - that is 370(3). The Constituent Assembly didn't exercise this power.

Sr Adv Rajeev Dhavan: First question is of temporality because that goes to the real issue. What does temporary mean in 370?

Shah: You cannot form a nation by force or by compulsion. Win the hearts of the people.

Senior Advocate Zaffar Shah concludes his arguments.