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Breakthrough in Jammu shrine crisis

Praveen Swami

Government to allow temporary use of forest land for Amarnath pilgrims

NEW DELHI: In a dramatic midnight breakthrough, government negotiators and the Shri Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti have finalised a deal to end the communally-charged agitation that had crippled the Jammu region for the past eight weeks.

Highly placed Jammu and Kashmir government sources said well past midnight on Saturday that the deal whose contours were first reported in this newspaper last week gives the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board the right to use forest land around the south Kashmir cave temple during the pilgrimage each year.

In effect, the deal rolls back a Jammu and Kashmir Cabinet order issued at the end of June, which revoked land-use rights granted to the Shrine Board. Issued in response to growing protests against the land-use rights in Kashmir, the Cabinet decision ended up provoking a massive, communally charged mobilisation in Jammu.

Jammu and Kashmir Governor N.N. Vohra, who is the ex-officio chairperson of the SASB, is now expected to reconstitute the Shrine Board. Government sources said he will appoint Jammu and Kashmir state subjects to the SASB, to assuage fears that that Shrine Board could abuse its land-use rights to engineer the large-scale settlement of outsiders.

Highly placed sources in the Samiti, a coalition of Jammu-based groups which includes both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, said a delegation would convey its assent to the government’s chief negotiator, the former Chief Secretary Sudhir Bloeria, in the early hours of Sunday.

On Sunday, the Samiti will make the deal public at a rally scheduled to be held in a city stadium.

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