NEW DELHI - India’s prime minister opened talks with politicians from revolt-hit Kashmir on Tuesday in a bid to ease tensions in the divided state, but little progress was likely with separatists boycotting the meeting. The “Kashmir roundtable” has been billed as an internal peace process for the region and the talks are the third such meeting for groups in the Indian-administered part of the area, which is divided between nuclear-rivals India and Pakistan.“There are two dimensions to the problems of Jammu and Kashmir. One is an internal one and the other an external one, involving Indo-Pakistan relations,” said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the start of the talks. “It is our intention and sincere desire to advance on both fronts towards resolving the problems through a process of dialogue.”
A peace process with Pakistan, known as the composite dialogue, was started by the two nations in January 2004.
| And it's going nowhere as fast as the internal dimension. |
But separatists in Indian-held Kashmir, where an insurgency against Indian rule has raged since 1989, say that the internal dialogue can go nowhere without the presence of the militants and of Pakistan. “It (the roundtable) is a futile exercise,” Yasin Malik, a former militant who is now a separatist politician heading the pro-independence Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, told AFP Tuesday. “Talks should be held exclusively with the people who question India’s authority over Kashmir and not with those who already swear by the Indian constitution.”
Even moderate separatists have dismissed the talks as a waste of time. “We are not against talks. But talks should involve militant leaders from India and Pakistan and both parts of Kashmir,” moderate separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq said last week. Farooq heads the region’s moderate faction of the main separatist alliance, the Hurriyat Conference, which is pushing for total independence for Kashmir, and has held separate talks with India and Pakistan.