NEW DELHI: In a historic decision, the Modi government on Monday changed the terms of engagement with Jammu and Kashmir by doing away with the special status the state enjoyed under Article 370, scrapping Article 35A and splitting the sensitive border state into two Union Territories of J&K and Ladakh.The proposed J&K UT will, like Delhi and Puducherry, have a legislature while the one designed for Ladakh, like Chandigarh, will not have one. Ladakh has an executive council, which itself is the result of a long battle for UT status that began close to three decades ago, and this will continue.The decisions were ratified by Rajya Sabha by an impressive two-thirds majority, and will sail through BJP-dominated Lok Sabha, putting an end to the state of J&K as it has existed as an administrative unit and radically transforming its relationship with the Centre. With the Kashmir Valley under a communication blackout, it will be a few days before the repercussions on the ground can be assessed.The government pushed through the big changes by getting Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu to relax rules on the time needed before a bill is tabled and this allowed home minister Amit Shah to set the ball rolling on Monday morning. Never before have such momentous legislative changes come about in the space of a day. Though main opposition Congress and some other parties objected, several non-NDA and non-UPA parties broke ranks and supported the bill, sensing popular support for the move.During the debate in Rajya Sabha, Shah said statehood could be restored to J&K once normalcy was established: a goal which, he admitted, might not be achieved soon. This is the first instance since the linguistic reorganisation of states in 1956 when a state has been turned into a UT.The move, a gamble to many, can have repercussions far beyond J&K by impacting political fault lines. It privileges right-wing views of national unity and integrity over Nehruvian ideals of diversity and, thus, marks a significant movement away from the ‘Idea of India’ attributed to the first PM.Article 370 remains, but will for all practical purposes be a dead letter; no longer the bulwark against extension of the Indian Constitution in its entirety to the state. It was the mother provision for Article 35A, inserted in the Constitution by a Presidential Order of 1954, which gave J&K residents a host of exemptions from central laws. It blocked enforcement of the fundamental right to equality guaranteed to all citizens, including ownership of land, equal employment opportunity and equal inheritance rights.In any case, with J&K being reduced to a couple of UTs, from now on, it is the Centre’s writ which will reign supreme.The decisive strike, within 100 days of PM Narendra Modi ’s re-election and coming against the backdrop of a massive deployment of security forces to deal with possible protests and any attempts by Pakistan to fan trouble, surpassed estimates of what the government was up to. The political class had braced itself for repeal of Article 35A but few, even in BJP, expected the audacious move to end J&K’s special status by neutering Article 370 and bifurcating and downgrading the state.The revocation of Article 35A was achieved by a Presidential Order (read a decision of the cabinet). While this, authorities insisted, would have been enough, the government got the monumental decision fortified by getting Rajya Sabha to approve it. Rajya Sabha also passed a separate bill to split the state into two UTs.The emasculation of Article 370 by removal of Article 35A, which guaranteed special status for J&K, marks a repudiation of the argument, held by many in the Valley and most political parties, that repeal of the twin provisions will undermine J&K’s integration with India in 1947.Article 370, which was supposed to be a temporary provision, placed serious restrictions, though increasingly only in theory, on the Centre’s jurisdiction over the state over matters other than defence, foreign affairs, currency and communication. Article 35A barred non-permanent citizens from acquiring land in the state to protect its existing demography and, for that purpose, even disinherited women of the state who chose to marry outside.BJP opposed Article 370 right since its inception on the ground that it encouraged secessionism and encouraged Pakistan's design to wrest it by using its proxies. The defiance differentiated it not just from its opponents but also from its allies. It repeated, like every time, the promise to junk both Articles 370 and 35A in its manifesto for the 2019 elections.The route taken by the government, where it achieved its purpose of virtually scrapping Article 370 was no less a surprise. The strategem took the opposition unawares. Congress called it a “mischief” and warned that it would fail judicial scrutiny, leading Shah to assert that its method was legally kosher.The change in the terms of business with Kashmir will reinforce Modi-Shah’s image as bold leaders and burnish their “nationalist” credentials. Extracted in exchange for accession to India at the time of independence, “separate status” for J&K has often been cited as non-negotiable. Though debatable, the political class acquiesced into it. It was also cited by Pakistan to question J&K’s merger with India.