Will talk to everybody: Dineshwar
RENEWED EFFORT Newly appointed interlocutor for J&K talks says he will make his first visit to the strifetorn Valley in 10 days
NEWDELHI: “For a substantive dialogue, I will need to talk to everybody”, former Intelligence Bureau director Dineshwar Sharma told Hindustan Times, minutes after home minister Rajnath Singh announced his name as the government’s representative to lead a “sustained dialogue” process for Jammu and Kashmir. The state has been on the boil since the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani in an encounter in July last year.
Sharma, who headed the Intelligence Bureau last year when violent protests followed the killing of Wani, was called in for a meeting with national security advisor Ajit Doval and the home minister a few hours before the formal announcement, top sources revealed.
Sharma did not want to answer questions on whether he would engage with separatists belonging to the Hurriyat Conference but emphasised that he would speak “to all stakeholders”.
“Peace must be restored in Kashmir and for that I will talk to all people in an effort to bring about a solution,’’ he said.
The newly appointed interlocutor said he will make his first visit to the strife-torn Valley within “eight-10 days” but multiple government sources con- firmed that a lot of homework has already been done.
An intelligence officer who did not want to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media, said, “We have been holding informal parleys with the separatists and have urged them to be part of the dialogue process.” It is not clear whether the separatists would be a part of the just announced dialogue process.
The parleys with various stakeholders — including former militants who gave up the gun and those who returned from camps in Pakistan where they had trained — were in progress when Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, said: ‘Na goli seh, na gali seh, baat banegi gale lag ke.” Modi had, from the ramparts of the Red Fort, indicated that the way forward lay in a dialogue and not through violence.
Several governments in the past have tried to find a solution through negotiations.
The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government held talks with the separatists and current CM Mehbooba Mufti has for long been asking Modi to “do a Vajpayee”. Mufti’s PDP and the BJP are coalition partners in J&K.
The UPA government too had appointed interlocutors after the unrest in the Valley in 2010 but the report, submitted to then home minister P Chidambaram, was never acted upon.