The Art of Living (AOL) Foundation mediated a meeting of former Prime Minister of Norway Kjell Magne Bondevik with hardline separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani in Srinagar on Friday.
Mr. Bondevik had also initiated talks between the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, for the Agra Summit in 2001, two years after the Kargil war.
AOL representative Sanjay Kumar, who was present at the meeting, told The Hindu that Mr. Bondevik wanted to meet the people in Srinagar, and he met various delegations.
In March, AOL founder Ravi Shankar had to leave a peace event organised by the foundation in Srinagar, after the audience raised slogans and walked out of the stadium, saying they had been tricked into attending the event.
Mr. Bondevik, currently president of the Oslo Center for peace and human rights, was accompanied by Ewald Poeran, managing director, World Forum for Ethics in Business.
‘Welcome move’
A senior government official said any move to bring peace and stability to Jammu & Kashmir was welcome, and the European delegation meeting the separatists would be of help. AOL’s role in arranging the meeting with separatists assumes significance as no government representative has had a dialogue with them since the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government came to power in May 2014. A parliamentary delegation was turned away by the separatists in 2016.
The Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), comprising Mr. Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, met the delegation at Hyderpora in Srinagar. Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) chief Yasin Malik was also scheduled to attend but could not because he was arrested by the police in Srinagar on November 19, following his anti-poll campaign.
Mr. Geelani and the Mirwaiz urged Mr. Bondevik to take up the Kashmir issue with the Government of India. Every Kashmiri yearns for a peaceful and dignified solution to the issue by implementing the UN resolutions or through tripartite dialogue among India, Pakistan and the people of Kashmir, the separatist leaders told him.
The former Norwegian Prime Minister, a Hurriyat spokesman said, “assured that he would use his good offices to ensure a sustained and a result-oriented dialogue between India and Pakistan, so that an amicable solution to the Kashmir issue is found.”
A delegation of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), headed by its president Sheikh Ashiq, also met Mr. Bondevik and Mr. Poeran.
‘Far from normal’
“We told the visiting delegation that as long as there is no structured, meaningful and effective dialogue among the leaders of India, Pakistan and genuine representatives of our State, the situation would continue to remain far from normal,” Mr. Ashiq told The Hindu .
The KCCI, Mr. Ashiq said, sought intervention and “suggested that the cross-LoC trade could not grow because of the lack of basic economic requirements and restrictions on a number of products”.
