“Tuhindi Article” (“The Articles Were Yours”)

Abstract

On 5 August 2019, a radical change was made to Article 370 in the Constitution of India. The provision had been popularly represented to safeguard the autonomy of Jammu & Kashmir. This change was also accompanied by what can best be described as a brutal “siege” – characterised by mass detentions, communication blackouts, press curbs, and curfews, to name a few. Around this time, a feminist collective came out with a version of “Bella Ciao,” clear in their distancing from the laws that were never theirs to begin with and their assertion of how they belonged to the Indian State. As they say, “Tuhindi Article” (“The Articles Were Yours”). Yet, all of this is said with a sense of loss and rage to mark this moment of “constitutional” change. This article is an attempt to take their articulation (and this paradox) more seriously than is conventionally taken in constitutional law scholarship – especially now that the Supreme Court of India has also upheld the validity of the changes made to Article 370 in 2019. Centring this voice, the article attempts to understand it. Through such interrogation, the piece urges us to problematise the use of the Indian constitutional framework in the engagement with Jammu & Kashmir and invites us to pay closer attention to ways that it becomes a tool that works and is worked towards striking at the heart of what the singers call “collective struggles” and “hopes”. More specifically, thinking through moments of the birth, life, and the purported demise of Article 370, this article hopes to demonstrate that the focus on Article 370 in conversations and legal practice has contributed to flattening text-book international (law) issues of contested sovereignties, and violently erases a long history and plurality attached to the self-determination driven struggles (and those expressing them). Besides advancing reasons for taking such articulations more seriously, the piece nudges towards the need to conceptualise roles where the use of the constitutional framework, will not see past this and make space for questions of self-determination and contested sovereignties.