In the age of social media, there is at least one parliamentary intervention that attracts exceptional attention. In last week’s Lok Sabha debate on Jammu and Kashmir, that honour was bestowed on Jamyang Tsering Namgyal from Ladakh. What the 34-year-old BJP MP said was less important than the passion of his delivery and, much more important, the fact that he spoke for a region of the erstwhile state whose existence was hitherto barely acknowledged.

In the list of conflict zones that help sustain the ‘conflict resolution’ and human rights industries, Kashmir features prominently. It is flaunted as a symbol of Muslim victimhood and liberal angst, and is important to both jihadis in Pakistan and editorial writers in Manhattan. Their idea of Kashmir is, however, confined to the Kashmir Valley — a zone that contributes three of the 543 parliamentary constituencies. There are three other seats from the other two regions of J&K. Of the six MPs, three supported the Narendra Modi government’s initiative and three opposed it.

It is important to grasp the political geography of J&K for two reasons. First, the Kashmir Valley isn’t the whole of J&K. For every person backing their chants of Azadi with a volley of stones, there are equal numbers willing to wave the Indian tri-colour. Secondly, as the vote in Parliament demonstrated, the mood against persisting with a constitutional status for J&K was overwhelming and bipartisan. Judging by the ecstatic popular response to last Monday’s announcement of the government’s proposal, the supposed sacredness of J&K’s special status was centred on a bubble that was easy to burst. India enthusiastically endorsed the application of the Constitution to the whole country.

The relative ease — although backed by rigorous floor management — with which the new legislation on J&K was secured in Parliament raises the larger question of why it hadn’t been done earlier. Whatever may have been the compulsions of the Constituent Assembly making an exception for J&K, the ‘temporary’ nature of Article 370 was always understood.

There were at least two occasions when Article 370 could have been buried. In 1972, in the aftermath of the Pakistan army’s surrender in Dhaka, Indira Gandhi could have made J&K’s accession to India non-negotiable as the price for the return of 93,000 Pakistani soldiers in Indian captivity. Instead, she quite mistakenly — and, ironically, egged on by a fellow Kashmiri Pandit — chose the path of magnanimity. The Simla Agreement, in effect, acknowledged a role for Pakistan in J&K.

Secondly, in 1990, when the Valley was in turmoil and the Hindu minority was subjected to a vicious bout of ethnic cleansing, the time was opportune to review a constitutional arrangement that violated the basic principles on which the Republic had been created. The Indian state became a mute spectator to the exodus of an entire community whose only fault was that they professed a particular religion.

The circumstances in 1972 and 1990 were undoubtedly different. In 1972, Indira Gandhi was at the peak of her power and Pakistan was devastated, having lost its eastern wing. In 1990, the governments of V P Singh in Delhi and Benazir Bhutto in Islamabad were fragile and economically vulnerable. However, in India at least, there was a common thread. Both Indira Gandhi and V P Singh would, ideally, have been happy to put J&K on par with the rest of India—not least to bolster themselves politically in the rest of the country. Unfortunately, they clung to a misplaced belief that the special status of J&K was a test of India’s secularism.

Enhancing Sheikh Abdullah’s political confidence in India’s bona fides may have contributed to the original decision in 1949. However, in time, autonomy became a red herring since specific guarantees on land rights for state subjects could easily have been accommodated in another clause within Article 371, as has happened in Himachal Pradesh. Instead, Article 370 became a badge of emotional separatism that was deftly used by the regional parties in J&K for their own narrow ends.

Far from confronting this frontally, successive governments in Delhi mistakenly equated Article 370 with the larger question of minority rights in India. The same logic that prevented any Muslim personal law reform since 1939 worked to celebrate the principle of differentiated citizenship for Muslims in general and J&K in particular. The Constitution was deemed to be great but so great that some people had to be protected from it.

It is to the credit of Modi and Amit Shah that they confronted this political distortion uninhibitedly. Someone had to.