Faesal, Shehla get names deleted from 370 plea | India News

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the home ministry’s affidavit the day before detailing development work and improvement in the law and order situation in J&K following the scrapping of Article 370 need not be taken into consideration as it had nothing to do with the challenge to the constitutional validity of the Union government’s August 5, 2019 decision. Solicitor general Tushar Mehta said the affidavit was meant only to apprisethe court of the post-2019 situation in J&K, where normalcy had returned after nearly three decades of terrorist activities.
When senior advocate Dushyant Dave said the Centre’s affidavit was widely reported in the media, the CJI said it was not relevant for the purpose of adjudicating the validity of the Constitution (Application to Jammu & Kashmir) Order, 2019, which superseded the Constitution (Application to Jammu & Kashmir) Order, 1954, as well as the addition of Clause 4 to Article 367making the Constitution of India applicable to J&K. Before its defanging, Article 370, supposed to be a temporary provision, gave special status to J&K for 70 years.
The court appointed two advocates as nodal counsel to ensure a common compilation was prepared for the court and every counsel appearing in the case. Original petitioners, IAS officer Shah Faesal and former JNU vicepresident and AISA member Shehla Rashid, through senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, requested the court to delete their namesfrom the array of parties. The court accepted their request. Faesal had resigned from the civil services to float a political party but later rejoined service. In January, the Delhi LG had given sanction for prosecution of Rashid for tweeting unverified allegations against Army operations in Kashmir.
After an advocate complained that his PIL, though filed first, was listed way down among the bunch of petitions, the CJI-led bench decided to list the cases under a generic name ‘In Re: Article 370 of the Constitution’.