What should be the single-most consideration of the three member team of the interlocutors in Kashmir? Of course, not the meetings with the diverse one to two member organizations or individuals, even while such interactions may be necessary to understand the sentiment and aspirations on the ground.  It should be primarily the engagement with the separatists who contest the status quo in Kashmir. And the one way to engage them is to consider the conditions they seek to be fulfilled before the dialogue takes place. Ideally, one would want a dialogue without any pre-conditions on both sides.  The engagement under the circumstances could be hoped to promote mutual understanding and the recognition of each other's goals necessary for an incremental progress towards the solution. But such a mechanism is now seen as a non-starter in a place which has seen numerous rounds of dialogue between Centre and the separatist actors in Srinagar end up nowhere. Their result invariably has been the discrediting of the separatist leadership who despite the great risks involved in engaging New Delhi have had to show nothing for the effort. Chairman of the one Hurriyat faction Mirwaiz Umar Farooq often bemoans that he got nothing for his investment in dialogue with New Delhi undertaken under great odds. Instead the centre abandoned the dialogue half way through, just when it was poised to get into the business of problem solving. The initiative started by the BJP led NDA government and sustained through one of the most turbulent phases in the Valley, was slowly phased out by the UPA dispensation when it took over in 2004. Subsequent engagements between the separatists and New Delhi were fewer and far between, reduced to a few informal contacts or what subsequently became popular as the quiet dialogue.  And with situation in Valley returning to an uneasy peace through the middle of the past decade, Centre’s interest in engaging Hurriyat correspondingly declined. That is, before it all blew up on our face this summer and during the previous two summers. The scale of the popular anger in Valley as witnessed in past three years has shown that New Delhi can no longer afford to sleep over a response to the situation in the State.  Are interlocutors the solution? May be not. Their appointment in the wake of the ongoing upheaval smacks of a knee-jerk reaction, a recourse to a treatment that has been tried and rejected several times before. The interlocutors themselves are downgrading the initiative further by following in the footsteps of their predecessors, trick by trick. And in the process, they only help evoke a sense of de javu, a recurrent feeling that this initiative is relentlessly heading into the same fate that met the likes of K C Pant, R K Mishra, Kashmir Committee and the present governor  N N Vohra. That is, if the initiative is not inherently designed to end like this. And if the goal is truly a solution, this calls for a fundamental shift in the strategy and the practices adopted so far. The immediate priority, in any case, should be to draw separatists into a dialogue which they believe in. A dialogue that creates a sense of incremental progress towards some goal. And for this to happen, the interlocutors will have to first take up for consideration the proposals made by the separatists to get into an engagement. There are four such proposals by Mirwaiz and five demands by his Hurriyat counterpart Geelani. Both set of conditions are similar except for one: Geelani’s demand for the recognition of Kashmir as a disputed territory. And if the observations by the current interlocutors are anything to go by and indicate any such verbal shift in New Delhi, then we seem to have almost got there. It needs a little boldness, little innovation and a little imagination to respond to the demands. Rewards will be fast and quick. Soon, we will have cranked up a promising dialogue process. And this time with Geelani on board.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 IST