On govt’s plea, Supreme Court defers Article 35A hearing till January

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday gave in to repeated requests from the J&K government and the Centre to defer till the second week of January hearing on petitions challenging validity of Article 35A of the Constitution.
The petitioners have questioned the provision’s legality, claiming it discriminates between J&K’s permanent residents and other Indians in voting, employment, getting seats in educational and professional institutions and owning property, as also on the basis of gender.
There was pandemonium before a bench of CJI Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud as a clutch of advocates for the petitioners stoutly countered the request for adjournment by attorney general K K Venugopal and additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre and J&K, respectively.
Before adjourning, the bench made a light-hearted comment that the issue was more than 60 years old and there was no urgency in taking it up. But former solicitor general Ranjit Kumar said if the SC could expeditiously take up the challenge to the centuries-old tradition barring women in the age group of 10-50 years from Sabarimala temple, why not this case, which involved a provision that was ex-facie unconstitutional as well as gender discriminatory? The bench said no constitutional issue was involved in the Sabarimala case.
Kumar said constitutional issues were involved in the temple case as right to profess and practice religion was argued with vehemence.
In between, lawyers tried to argue that a woman permanent resident of J&K was deprived of owning property just because she married a man of her choice from outside the state. “Is this constitutional?” Kumar asked. adding that the woman’s children were barred in government-run professional colleges.
ASG Mehta conceded there could be an issue of gender discrimination in the Presidential Order [The Constitution (Application to Jammu & Kashmir) Order, 1954]. “Given the ground situation in the state, which will see panchayat polls from September till December, the time is not appropriate to hear the matter. Let the polls be over and the court can take up the issue,” he said.