“By general law, the life and limbs of every person must be protected.In case of a medical emergency, often a limb is amputated to preserve a life, but a life is not given away to protect a limb,” Attorney General R Venkataramani said as he began the defence of theCentre’s August 5, 2019 decision to scrap J&K’s special status as a precursor to division of the state into two UTs. The top law officer said the government action achieved a delicate balance between preserving the nation and Constitution on the one hand and safeguarding national interest on the other.
A bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, B R Gavai and Surya Kant was quick to dissuade the AG from justifying the decision with ‘ends justify the means’ argument. “We cannot postulate a situation where end justifies the means. The means should also be consistent with the end,” said the bench, a remark that was interpreted as suggesting that while the change in the status of J&K may have led to marked improvement in law and order situation in the terror-scarred state, the Centre needed to prove that it adhered to the constitutional procedures in letter and spirit.
Outlining contours of his arguments that he would advance after Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had taken the court through the historical processes for complete integration of J&K with India, the AG said the President had the powers, as seen on several occasions in the past when orders were issued for applying provisions of the Constitution to J&K, to strip the state of its special status even when its assembly had been dissolved by imposition of Article 356. Venkataramani said the SC would defer to Parliament’s wisdom in taking a decision for a border state.
“The justiciability of decisions taken to deal with matters relating to border states may not be as in case of general rung of reorganisation of states or imposition of President’s rule,” he said.
“The long history of internal disturbances, lack of availability of real measures of rights and justice are matters that can be legitimately taken into account for paving the paths for due course rearrangement. No person can have a vested right in favour of a perennial state of unrest and all instruments of law which have not subserved peace and justice have no inherent right to exist or continue,” the AG said.