'Time-buying tactic': Separatists dismiss appointment of Centre's interlocutor

Srinagar: While the Central government is trying to talk to all concerned parties in Kashmir, separatist leaders in the state are not ready to budge from their demands. Separatists on Tuesday called the appointment of Dineshwar Sharma as interlocutor "a new tactic" by the Centre and asserted that they won't have any talks with him.

The Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), a conglomerate of senior separatist leaders, rejected any possibility of engaging in parleys with former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma.

In a statement issued by Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), a conglomerate of senior separatist leaders said it is a 'futile exercise'. 

"To be part of this so-called dialogue process would be a futile exercise for any Kashmiri since this new tactic has been adopted by the Indian government after its failure to crush the aspirations of the freedom loving people through military repression," Hardline Hurriyat Conference leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, head of moderate Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and JKLF chief Yasin Malik said in a joint statement.

The statement added: "In principle we have always advocated and supported sincere and productive dialogue as a means to resolve the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Our stand on dialogue requires the basic acknowledgment that there is a dispute that has to be resolved."

"The Indian government has continuously refused to accept this basic premise and the reality on the ground," it added.

They also took strong exception to Sharma's statement that Jammu and Kashmir has to be saved from becoming another Syria. "To compare the internationally recognized 70-year-old political and humanitarian issue of Kashmir to that of the sectarian war and power struggle in Syria is deception and propaganda as there is no relation between the two situations," they said.