Seven years ago, a single parliamentary resolution rewrote the constitutional map of India. On 5 August, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant marked the anniversary of the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, calling it the end of a decades-old asymmetry that had kept Jammu and Kashmir outside the full reach of the Indian Constitution.

Sawant invoked the old political slogan 'Ek Desh Mein Do Vidhan, Do Nishan, Do Pradhan' — 'One country, two constitutions, two emblems, two prime ministers' — to frame what the 2019 decision dismantled. The phrase, long associated with critics of Article 370, captured the argument that the provision created a constitutional two-tier India. That argument, Sawant said, is now history.

The decision that reshaped J&K's constitutional status

On 5 August 2019, the Union government moved the Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order 2019 and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act in Parliament. Union Home Minister Amit Shah moved the resolution in the Rajya Sabha, ending the special status that had been in place since the early years of the republic. The former state was simultaneously reorganised into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

The provisions being removed were themselves described as 'temporary' in the Constitution, though they had endured for nearly seven decades. Article 35A, which allowed the J&K legislature to define 'permanent residents' and restrict property rights and government jobs to that category, was a companion provision that fell alongside Article 370.

Syama Prasad Mookerjee's unfinished demand, finally answered

Sawant's post explicitly named Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951, as the ideological forefather of the abrogation. Mookerjee had campaigned against the requirement for a separate permit to enter J&K and died in detention in Srinagar in 1953 while agitating for full constitutional integration. His demand for 'One Nation, One Constitution' became a foundational plank of the Jana Sangh and its successor, the BJP.

The abrogation, in BJP's framing, was the fulfilment of a promise that had been made and deferred for over sixty years — a lineage Sawant drew a direct line to in his post.

One Nation, One Constitution — and what comes next for J&K

The BJP has consistently positioned the abrogation alongside other uniformity-driven moves — the Goods and Services Tax rollout, the push for a Uniform Civil Code — as part of a broader project of constitutional and economic integration. Sawant's framing of the anniversary as a step toward Viksit Bharat ('Developed India') places it within that same arc.

The practical test of the 2019 decision, however, continues to unfold in the union territories themselves — in the pace of development spending, the restoration of statehood, and the functioning of elected local governance. The anniversary is a moment of political commemoration; the longer story is still being written on the ground in Srinagar and Leh.

For the BJP, 5 August is now a date on the political calendar as fixed as any national holiday — a marker of what the party calls its most consequential act of governance. CM Sawant's post is one voice in that annual chorus, but the question every anniversary sharpens is the same: has constitutional integration translated into the lived integration of Jammu and Kashmir's people into India's mainstream?