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| Dead set Hurriyat has a bigger task before it | | |
ABID SHAH
NEW DELHI, FEB 23: All Party Hurriyat Conference chairman Maulvi Umar Farooq arrived here yesterday along with a Hurriyat delegation to meet Pakistan Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir ahead of his meeting with his Indian counterpart Nirupama Rao slated for Thursday.
Pakistan Foreign Secretary is expected to arrive here along with a six-member delegation on Wednesday. And Hurriyat leaders from both factions -- that of Mirwaiz and Syed Ali Shah Gilani – will hold talks with the visiting dignitary before official level talks takes place between the two Foreign Secretaries.
Hurriyat leaders have been invited by Pakistan High Commission here. And the name of Deputy High Commissioner of Pakistan in New Delhi Rifat Masood has been cited in newspaper reports for the move to invite Hurriyat delegations lead by Mirwaiz and Gilani for the meeting with the visiting Foreign Secretary.
Gilani has already been in Delhi for past several weeks in the wake of treatment of his eyes and he has ever since been convalescing after a surgery. He is known for his hard stance on Kashmir which has a clear tilt towards Pakistan and, thus, Islamabad could only ill afford to ignore him or his cohorts during its Foreign Secretary’s visit to New Delhi.
Efforts to elicit information regarding the exact nature or agenda for talks between Pakistan Foreign Secretary and Hurriyat leaders did not yield much. Yet this signifies the primacy that Pakistan wants to give to Kashmir in discussions with India.
To counter this, the Indian efforts to engage separatist Hurriyat leaders in talks have not gone beyond initial stages through brief contacts that once brought Mirwaiz in discussion with Union Home Minister P Chidambaram.
The Indian move to engage Hurriyat received a near fatal blow when one of the separatist leaders Fazal Haq Qureshi was brutally attacked. Ever since Hurriyat has been cold to Home Ministry’s offer of talks though it did not totally close the option for this.
Hurriyat leaders including Mirwaiz who had once warmed up for talks with Chidambaram later described the exercise as “meaningless” without the inclusion of Pakistan or making this a tripartite discussion which includes separatist leaders like him as also Gilani.
Now sources say that Hurriyat leaders would express similar retorts before Salman Bashir since they fear that the agenda for Thursday talks between the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan could bypass Kashmir. Yet this is an overt Hurriyat position whereas the Indian view in this regard is that Pakistan wants to give prominence to the issue of Kashmir by inviting Hurriyat leaders for talks.
Indications are that despite the long drawn chill besetting Indo-Pak relations both the countries are now under intense international pressure to revive and keep open channels between them and ease tensions on their borders besides coming to a truce of some sort where intermittent terror strikes through parts of India that have been causing intense consternations extending beyond the confines of the two countries are at least minimised for now and eliminated altogether in near future.
And as Hurriyat has decided along with Pakistan to intercede, the separatist stalwarts are also having the onus to come to terms with the new wave of opinion sweeping through the world. This warrants strife to give way to progress. And the times wrap vis-à-vis the last that have hit Kashmir too cry out for matching the pace that the rest of the world has attained.
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