Interlocutors in Srinagar, ready to meet wide sections, says Radha Kumar
By ANISaturday, October 23, 2010
NEW DELHI - The team of interlocutors, set up by the Central Government to look into Kashmir issue, after reaching Srinagar on Saturday said that it is going to meet a wide section of people.
One of the interlocutors Professor Radha Kumar told ANI over the phone, “I am expected to meet a wide range of people by the evening.”
Asked weather she would be meeting the separatists hawk Syed Ali shah Geelani, Radha Kumar said: “I have no idea about that if I would be meeting him.”
“As Mr. Geelani knows it very well, on previous occasions when I met him, it has always been through a request on my side that he received me, and he said, ‘yes’, and so I went to meet him”
On Thursday (October 21), while addressing a convention on ‘Azadi-the Only way’, organised by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP) at New Delhi, Geelani had termed the team of Interlocutors as ‘fraud’ and asked the people of Kashmir Valley to boycott them.
Geelani had also described the exercise of sending interlocutors to the Valley, as a strategy of the Central Government to gain time, as they were ‘not sincere’ towards finding a permanent solution to the Kashmir problem.
She said:” I am not surprised. I hope that overtime they feel it will be useful to engage in a conversation with us. After all it’s their task as much as ours to solve the longstanding issue.”
About the interlocutor’s visit to Kashmir, Dr. Radha Kumar said: “It’s a good step that the Centre has taken, but a difficult one.” By Sandhya Sharma(ANI)
