Coming to the technical legal arguments, the petitioners have disputed the precedents cited by the Centre to say that Article 370 had already previously been used to modify itself. They have pointed out that these earlier amendments were meant for very different purposes, and only made “interpretive” changes – they did not substantively change the nature of Article 370, as the Centre had done in August.

The most important argument reiterated in the rejoinder (which they say the government has failed to address) is that major, irreversible changes to the federal structure and the application of the Constitution to a State cannot be undertaken by the Centre using the temporary powers granted to them during a time of President’s Rule.

The petitioners not only cite the famous Kesavananda Bharti ‘Basic Structure’ decision of the Indian Supreme Court to support this argument, but they also refer to the recent UK Supreme Court judgment on prorogation of their Parliament. The UK’s top court here said that exercise of state power is not unlimited in a constitutional system – the test is to see if “the exercise of power will have the effect of frustrating the constitutional principle at issue.”