Article 370 thing of past, no going back: Kashmiri IAS officer Shah Faesal

Days ahead of a scheduled hearing of a batch of pleas related to the abrogation of Article 370 before a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court, IAS officer Shah Faesal on Tuesday said the constitutional provision is a thing of the past and there is no going back.

"(Article) 370, for many Kashmiris like me, is a thing of the past. Jhelum and Ganga have merged in the great Indian Ocean for good. There is no going back. There is only marching forward," Faesal wrote on Twitter.

A 2010-batch Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, Faesal was detained for more than a year after the provisions of Article 370 were abrogated and the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated into Union territories in August 2019. He resigned from service and launched the Jammu Kashmir People's Movement, a political entity, in January 2019.

The government, however, did not accept his resignation and Faesal, who is also a doctor, was subsequently posted to the Union Ministry of Culture.

Faesal filed a petition in the Supreme Court in 2019, challenging the Centre's decision to scrap Article 370. In April 2022, the government accepted Faesal's application for withdrawing his resignation from service and reinstated him. The same month, Faesal filed an application in the court seeking the deletion of his name from the list of seven petitioners who had challenged the scrapping of Article 370.

Nearly four years after the government abrogated Article 370 that bestowed a special status on the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, a five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud will take up a batch of pleas challenging the decision for hearing on July 11.

According to a notice published on the apex court's website on Monday, the bench will take up the pleas for passing directions.