Article 370 of the Indian constitution gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir, a region located in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent and part of the larger region of Kashmir which has been the subject of a dispute between India, Pakistan and China since 1947. Jammu and Kashmir was administered by India as a state from 17 November 1952 to 31 October 2019, and Article 370 conferred on it the power to have a separate constitution, a state flag, and autonomy of internal administration.

Quotes

• The question, however, is whether Modi had any choice in Kashmir and whether, over time, the revocation of an article conceived as temporary breaks the Kashmiri logjam, pries open the stranglehold of corrupt local elites and offers a better future. I think it might. .... “We revoked a temporary constitutional provision that slowed down development, created alienation, led to separatism, fed terrorism and ended up as a deadly national security problem,” Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the external affairs minister of India, told me. “We know the last 70 years did not work in Kashmir. It has bled us. It would be Einsteinian insanity to do the same thing and expect a different result.”... Modi will not turn back from his elimination of Kashmir’s autonomy. That phase of Indian history is over. Trump and Modi are both forceful, media-savvy politicians. But they are not alike. Modi, a self-made man from a poor family, is measured, ascetic, not driven by impulse. Trump was born on third base. He’s erratic, guided by the devouring needs of his ego. I’d bet on Modi to transform India, all of it, including the newly integrated Kashmir region.
  • Roger Cohen, Don’t Mess With Modi in Texas , NYT, Sept. 22, 2019

• Equal status to all states and equal rights to all citizens is the BJP secularism.
  • BJP spokesman K. L. Sharma. Reported in Indian Express, 21/12/1990. Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• The separate status for the state of Kashmir (Article 370) is again a discrimination in secular matters on the basis of religion, viz. its being a state with a Muslim majority. Nehru sycophants have tried to explain this irresponsible and communalist Article as follows:
  "The special problems of Jammu and Kashmir do not arise only out of the fact of its being a Muslim-majority state. It is also a state coveted by a foreign power which has thrice gone to war with India to capture the state,... whose territory is partly under hostile foreign occupation,... which is geopolitically located in the cockpit of international intrigue." ... But our Nehruvian knows it all better: "It is with a view to addressing ourselves to these very special problems... that the constitutional device of Article 370 was evolved."
  If that is true, then we must recognize in all sincerity that this device has been ineffective. It has not stopped the Chinese from annexing parts of Karakoram and Ladakh, it has not stopped Pakistan from invading it twice more, it has not prevented the ongoing skirmishes over the Siachen glacier, it has not prevented the general spread of secessionism, it has not prevented the Kashmiri Muslims from practicing majorityism at the expense of the Hindu and Buddhist areas of Jammu and Ladakh and from hounding out the Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, and it has not given private investors the confidence to go in and bring some genuine economical development. Short, in every geopolitical, communal and even economical respect, it has been an outrageous failure.
  • Mani Shankar Aiyar; Elst. Mani Shankar Aiyar in Illustrated Weekly of India, 29/7/1990, Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

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