The Supreme Court’s decision to dismiss the plea challenging the validity of delimitation of the electoral constituencies of Jammu and Kashmir(J&K) after the scrapping of Article 370 was not entirely unpredictable. But the grounds the top court has cited to set aside the petition by the two eminent Kashmiri petitioners are telling.
The bench of justices SK Kaul and AS Oka, has argued that the petitioners have not challenged the parent law—the J&K Reorganisation Act that mandated the setting up of the Delimitation Commission in the region, and that the court cannot “interfere with the law made by the Legislature unless it is specifically challenged by incorporating specific grounds of challenge in the pleadings.”
In other words, the court insists that the J&K Reorganisation Act which dismembered the J&K state and spelled out a new constitutional charter for the region, rightfully empowered the government to roll out measures such as resizing electoral constituencies. And because the petitioners hadn’t impugned the law itself but disputed the specifications stipulating delimitation, the courts were, in effect, restrained from going into the “validity of statutory provisions.”