New Delhi, May 15 : Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said that Article 370, now scrapped, which gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir, was meant to be a “temporary” provision since the beginning.
Amit Shah made the remarks while speaking at the inauguration of a training programme on legislative drafting in New Delhi today.
Referring to Article 370, which the Centre repealed in 2019, he said the whole country wanted that the provision of the Constitution should not be in existence.
He said that when the Article was framed, it was mentioned in the index as “Temporary Provision of Article 370”. “Even debates on the Article were missing from the records of constituent assembly debates. They were not printed,” he said.
He said it could well be imagined that whoever had drafted it and those who were part of the constituent assembly, how intelligently they put it and how after lots of thought the “temporary” word was inserted.
“An article of the Constitution cannot be temporary, it can be amended. If you read it even today, it is clearly written as Temporary Provision of Article 370,” he said.
The home minister said that Article 370 is no longer in existence as it has been repealed now. “But please read it. It was mentioned in the index as ‘Temporary Provision of Article 370’. If this ‘temporary’ word was not written, what would have happened. Tell me, can a provision of the Constitution be ‘temporary’,” he asked.
