On August 5 this year, when the Indian government scrapped Article 35A, Dr Asha Naithani Dayama, said a prayer at her Kandivli home. "Who would have thought?" says Dayama, a former Hindi professor at Mumbai's St Xavier's College. Dayama wasn't the only one who did not see it coming. Last year, when she visited villages across Jammu and Kashmir to meet "West Pakistani refugees", whose ancestors had migrated to India during the Partition, it is what most of them wondered aloud: When will we be considered Kashmiri residents?

Article 35A of the Indian Constitution gave the Jammu and Kashmir state legislature the right to define "permanent residents" of the state and provide special rights and privileges to those permanent residents. These included the freedom to purchase land and immovable property, vote and contest elections, seek government employment. Non-permanent residents of the state, even if Indian citizens, were not entitled to these "privileges". "Close to 70 years after India's Independence, they were still struggling to get the Permanent Residents Certificate (PRC) from the state. In the absence of a legal identity, they had no rights," she says.