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A retrograde signal

THE DETENTION OF Kashmiri separatist leaders — including the Hurriyat Conference Chairman, Abdul Ghani Bhat, and the Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) leader, Shabir Shah — reflects the arbitrariness and confusion which mark officially blessed attempts to resolve the Kashmir imbroglio through negotiations. The timing of the house arrests gives the game away. They were made barely 24 hours before the Ram Jethmalani-headed Kashmir Committee was to hold talks with a delegation of separatist leaders. Moreover, they were made on the very day that Mr. Shah's DFP and those owing allegiance to the Hurriyat Conference had proposed to launch an `awareness campaign' aimed at persuading people to boycott the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly poll.

It is not clear how long the detentions will be enforced, but independent reports establish that the leaders were ordered to stay at home (even though the Jammu and Kashmir police have denied making any house arrests). What the incidents expose is the insecurity and impatience of the Farooq Abdullah administration towards the entire exercise of entering into a dialogue with separatist leaders — the Chief Minister has gone as far as accusing the Kashmir Committee of having no other agenda but to undermine the National Conference. If the aim was to scuttle the dialogue, the house arrests may have achieved its cynical objective temporarily with the Hurriyat leaders declaring their inability to attend the second round of talks that was scheduled to take place in Delhi over the weekend. If a related objective was to dampen the anti-poll campaign, then surely this is something that should be done by persuading people about the importance of exercising their franchise and not through intimidatory tactics such as making house arrests of political voices seen as of consequence in Kashmir.

Whatever the motive, at a larger level, the incidents expose the total lack of coherence on the part of the Centre when it comes to policy matters on Jammu and Kashmir. A part of the reason for this is self-evident. We have a situation where the Centre, on the one hand, signals its (albeit tacit) support for the initiatives taken by the Kashmir Committee and, on the other hand, has as a constituent the National Conference, which has made no secret of its opposition to any proposal to constructively engage the separatists in a dialogue. The utter helplessness of the Centre in preventing the Abdullah Government from detaining separatist leaders on the eve of a dialogue which it is in favour of is unmistakable.

Added to this inherent contradiction is the lack of clarity that has characterised the Vajpayee Government's initiatives on the Kashmir front. From the beginning, there have been too many interlocutors with no clear approach about what they wanted to achieve and how they proposed to go about it. The much hyped K.C. Pant mission proved to be a non-starter with the Hurriyat objecting to the choice of the person who headed it. The recent nomination of Arun Jaitley, to discuss more devolution of power to Jammu and Kashmir, seemed more like a stratagem to give the National Conference something it could hold up as an achievement in the poll campaign rather than a serious bid to address the issue. As for the Kashmir Committee, it spent a good part of the time canvassing for the impossible — the postponement of elections after the election schedule was announced. Although the Centre has indicated that it supports the Committee's efforts, neither the Prime Minister nor the Home Minister cared to meet Mr. Shah when he was in Delhi recently — a visit which ended in his piqued assertion that he too would boycott the polls. If the second round of talks became possible, it was only because of a specific understanding that the dialogue will be delinked from the poll. It is a pity that a potentially forward-moving dialogue has been obstructed by a thoughtless move to detain Shabir Shah and the Hurriyat leaders. Such retrograde political signals such as these could dangerously dissipate much of the positive atmosphere created by New Delhi's decision to hold elections in the troubled State.

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