New Delhi: A five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court will hear on July 11 a clutch of requests challenging the scrapping of special status under Article 370 of the Constitution from Jammu and Kashmir.

Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Shah Faesal was one of the petitioners.

The judges who will hear the petitions are Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Sanjiv Khanna, BR Gavai and Surya Kant.

Special status to Jammu and Kashmir was scrapped in August 2019 and the state was divided into two Union Territories.

Before that, Article 370 gave Jammu and Kashmir its own constitution and decision-making rights for all matters barring defence, communications and foreign affairs. Its removal ended special status for Kashmir, which was key to its accession to India in 1947.

The politics of Jammu and Kashmir had been dominated by the National Conference, the Congress and later Mufti Mohammad Sayeed's Peoples Democratic Party, or PDP.

The BJP-PDP alliance in 2014 marked another milestone in Jammu and Kashmir's history. After the BJP pulled out of its coalition government with the PDP in 2018, President's rule was applied in the state.