Seven years after Parliament struck down Article 370 and Article 35A, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta has invoked the founding spirit of Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee — the man who gave his life demanding that one nation could not run under two constitutions, two flags, and two heads of state. Posting on 5 August 2026, the anniversary of the historic 2019 abrogation, CM Gupta wrote that the resolve of Dr. Mukherjee — 'ek desh mein do vidhaan, do nishaan aur do pradhaan nahin chalenge' ('one country cannot have two constitutions, two emblems, and two heads') — had finally been fulfilled through the 'decisive leadership' of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the 'unwavering will' of Union Home Minister Amit Shah. She called the abrogation 'the nation's decisive tribute to Dr. Mukherjee's sacrifice' and a victory for the idea of an undivided, unified India.

The vow Dr. Mukherjee made — and paid for

Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh — the ideological predecessor of today's BJP — was among the most vocal opponents of the special constitutional arrangement that governed Jammu and Kashmir after independence. In 1953, he defied the permit system that required Indian citizens to obtain permission before entering the state, crossing into Jammu and Kashmir in protest. He was detained and died in custody that same year, at the age of 52. His death transformed the demand for full constitutional integration into a cause that the Indian right would carry forward for six decades.

August 5, 2019: the constitutional wall comes down

On 5 August 2019, the Modi government moved a presidential order in Parliament revoking Article 370 — which had granted Jammu and Kashmir its own constitution, flag, and restricted applicability of central laws — alongside Article 35A, which had defined who qualified as a 'permanent resident' of the state with exclusive rights to property and government jobs. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act simultaneously bifurcated the state into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. The move was piloted in the Rajya Sabha by Home Minister Amit Shah and passed both Houses within hours. In December 2023, the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutional validity of the abrogation and the reorganisation.

A BJP promise, decades in the making

The abrogation did not arrive without a long political runway. The BJP had included the scrapping of Article 370 as a core electoral promise in its manifestos from the 1990s onward — making it one of the longest-running explicit commitments in Indian democratic politics. For the party's ideological base, the 2019 action represented not just a policy shift but the closure of an argument that stretched back to Mukherjee's protest march more than 70 years earlier. CM Gupta's post, timed precisely to the anniversary, threads that ideological needle — connecting a founding martyr to a sitting prime minister, and framing the constitutional act as the completion of an unfinished national project. With development schemes and infrastructure investment now flowing into the union territories, the question the anniversary sharpens is not whether integration happened — the Supreme Court has settled that — but what full integration looks like on the ground for the people of Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh.