New Delhi: The Centre will convene an
all party meeting once the interlocutors on Kashmir submit their recommendations for discussing them, Home Minister P Chidambaram has said.
"The interlocutors were appointed after the all party
meeting. So I suppose once the interlocutors give the report,
I think so, I will have to ask my colleagues and the Prime
Minister (Manmohan Singh), we will perhaps take the report to
the All Party Meeting," Chidambaram told.
Chidambaram said that the interlocutors had done bulk of their work and were now in the process of submitting their recommendations.
While no date on the submission of the report by the
three-member panel comprising noted journalist Dilip
Padgaonkar, academician Radha Kumar and former Chief
Information Commissioner M M Ansari had been fixed, sources
said that the final report may be handed over to the
government by end of the September this year.
The appointment of the three-member panel on Kashmir
was part of the eight-point Kashmir formula announced by the
Centre after an all party meeting in September last year that
was called after the Valley saw widespread unrest fuelled by
separatists.
The interlocutors have so far made 10 visits to the
state and covered 18 of the 22 districts during which they
have met nearly 5,000 people which includes political leaders,
trade unions, lawyers, student unions and newly elected Panchs
and Sarpanchs.
The panel will now be visiting four remaining
districts -- Shopian, Kupwara and Baramulla in Kashmir and
Sambha in Jammu after which they were expected to hold
meetings with major political parties in the state to discuss
broad contours of the report.
The panel had submitted its interim report nearly six
weeks back.
The terms and references of the interlocutors panel
were to hold talks all shades of opinion including mainstream
political parties and separatists. The panel will cover views
of all the three regions--Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir.
Radha Kumar, who heads the Nelson Mandela Institute of
Peace in Jamia Milia Islamia, had earlier also been engaged in
back-channel discussions with moderate Hurriyat Chairman
Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani.
However, the separatists including both factions of
Hurriyat Conference led by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Syed Ali
Shah Geelani have not met the interlocutors.
Former Hurriyat Chairman and a prominent Shia leader
Maulana Abbas Ansari had met one of the interlocutors but in his individual capacity.
The Centre had also announced constitution of two
special task forces for Jammu and Ladakh regions which were
mandated to examine the allocations in terms of infrastructure
needs and make suitable recommendations to overcome the
deficiencies in these two areas.
While Abhijit Sen, a Planning Commission member, was
leading a task force on Jammu, Narendra Jadhav, another
Planning Commission member, was the chairperson of the team on
Ladakh.
PTI
