The Opposition People's Democratic Party has told the interlocutors on Kashmir that a resolution effort would have to be invested with more credibility and seriousness, besides taking the separatists on board.
“Repression and denial of rights on the ground cannot go together with resolution efforts.” This could not produce any positive result,” party president Mehbooba Mufti said during an interaction with Dileep Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M. Ansari in Jammu on Monday.
Ms. Mehbooba told the interlocutors that the government, in its anxiety to“present a false picture” of its performance, had “unleashed the full might of the state to impose artificial normalcy on a people denied every right to a decent life,” a PDP statement said here.
While in the wake of a disastrous summer it was expected that the government would relax its “brutal repression” to provide relief to a people who had lost their dear ones and suffered physical, economic and psychological trauma, it further strengthened and almost institutionalised the existing draconian measures, she said.
Even teenagers were not spared. “Thousands were put behind bars for mostly unaccounted [reasons].” Many more had been forced to abandon their homes to evade arrest. This could prove the first fatal step towards the start of underground activity, she said. Discussing self-rule with the interlocutors, Ms. Mehbooba told them about a PDP solution through an evolutionary process that satisfied all stakeholders and took on board all points of view to make it sustainable.
Any solution would have to address the sense of siege that had gripped the State in the wake of partition. “We have to rediscover and revive our cultural and logistical channels of growth that had influenced all the three regions of the State for centuries but had become a victim of the politics of partition,” she said, emphasising the need to restore the historical links with Central Asia such as the fabled Silk Routes. “Similarly, channels of trade, travel and communication with the other side of the erstwhile State will have to be institutionalised for a virtual unification even as the integrity of the two countries is respected and preserved.” PDP patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed joined discussion for a while.
