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| At Pugwash, it is all hogwash | | | Early Times Reporter
Jammu | Mar 31
At Pugwash, it is all noise and claptrap. Far from giving a serious take to the Kashmir issue particularly when India is looking up to dealing with the new Pakistan government, the leaders from Jammu and Kashmir are playing up to the political constituency back home.
While the National Conference president Omar Abdullah is trying to convey that his party has grown accommodative to adopt whatever goes well to resolve Kashmir, his Peoples Democratic Party counterpart Mehbooba Mufti is going a bit farther. Omar is ready to forget the autonomy, Mehbooba is inviting militants to come and share power with her party.
At a platform offered by the Nobel prize winning peace making NGO Pugwash, the NC president Omar Abdullah has said that his party was ready to accept any solution "better than autonomy" to resolve the Kashmir issue, but added that it must also be acceptable to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
"We are even ready to accept any other solution, which is acceptable to the people of the state and is better than the road map put forward by my party," Omar said in his speech at the Pugwash Conference in Islamabad.
While the National Conference has never agreed to anything less than autonomy but the currently the party stand is running into a rough weather after startling revelations made by the former Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani that Farooq Abdullah made ideological compromise for power.
Autonomy, it may be mentioned here, with the flip flop politics of the Abdullahs have become an outdated issue in the Kashmir politics. When Omar promises to look beyond autonomy while speaking in Islamabad, he is actually addressing a constituency in Kashmir for coming out of the rubric.
Mehbooba Mufti on the other hand has invited the militant outfit Hizbul Mujahideen to shun the gun and contest elections and be a part in the government.
In her presentation at Islamabad, Mehbooba said “being fully conscious of the shortcomings of total reliance on intra-state solutions, in order to achieve a stable, sustainable and just solution to the J&K issue, we should combine intra-state measures (decentralisation and power-sharing) with inter-state and supra-state measures”.
This approach, she asserted, is the only way that would eliminate the sources of ethno-territorial conflicts, entrenched in the traditional notions of sovereignty, self-determination, national and ethnic borders. Both the countries, she said, should allow the people to move across borders, unfettered and hassle-free.
Ms Mufti also said all the separatist and militant groups especially Hizbul Mujahideen to be included in the dialogue to evolve a broader consensus for the peaceful resolution of the problem that has brought catastrophic disaster to the people of Jammu and Kashmir and marred the region's economic growth.
Regarding Indo-Pak peace process, she said the challenge lies in its sustenance besides ensuring that it is insulated from the day-to-day setbacks that have often derailed the process in the past. |
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