An Incomplete Bargain: Reading Indian Federalism through the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly

Jammu and Kashmir was the only state in India to write its own constitution and negotiate autonomy provisions in India’s 1950 constitution. This autonomy was enshrined in Article 370, a clause which was annulled in 2019. In this article, we examine the conception of political union between India and Kashmir as framed by Jammu and Kashmir’s own Constituent Assembly. We show that the act of federating with the Indian Union was viewed as a limited and conditional pooling of sovereignty. The Assembly sought to make Article 370 permanent to safeguard the state’s autonomy from legislative majorities in India and to preserve the right to redistribute land. We challenge the dominant classification of India’s federal origins as arising from power devolution by a previously unitary central authority (“holding together”), demonstrating the multicentered sovereignty which existed before the act of Union and which political actors on the margins sought to preserve.