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Mehbooba pitches for talks with Pak

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Sunday pitched afresh for a dialogue between India and Pakistan to end…

Mehbooba pitches for talks with Pak

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Sunday pitched afresh for a dialogue between India and Pakistan to end the violence in the restive state, even as a gunfight raged between terrorists and security forces in Srinagar.

The chief minister’s coalition partner, the BJP, is, however, said to have made it clear to Ms Mufti that terror and talks cannot go together. The chief minister also hit out at some media houses, which, she claimed, have created an atmosphere in which the very talk of talks was considered anti-national.

“If Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti say hold talks with Pakistan, they are dubbed anti-national. There is no alternative (to resolve the issue) except by holding talks,” Mehbooba told the state Assembly in Jammu on the concluding day of the budget session.

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“If we (the Kashmiris) don’t talk about it (dialogue), who will? Not a Bihari, not a punjabi,” she said. A CRPF constable was killed in a gunfight with terrorists in downtown Srinagar after security forces foiled militants’ attempts to strike a CRPF camp. The mllitants were still holed up in an abandoned house in Karan Nagar in the heart of the city where intermittent firing was on.

Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiyyaba said in an e-mailed statement that it was responsible for the attack on the CRPF camp. The heavily-armed militants tried to strike the CRPF camp, located very close to SMHS Hospital from where LeT militant Naveed Jutt alias Abu Hanzala was freed from police custody by terrorists on 6 February.

The incident comes two days after Jaish-e-Mohammad militants attacked an Army camp in Sunjwan area of Jammu, killing six people including five soldiers. Three militants were also killed in retaliation by the Army.

Search operations are still on (at the camp),” Jammu-based Army public relations officer Lt Col Devender Anand said. India and Pakistan, Mehbooba told the House, have fought three wars but the Kashmir problem has not been resolved.

“We have fought three wars in 1947, 1965 and 1971 and have won all of them, even Kargil war, but our basic problem has not been resolved,” she said, insisting a solution to the Kashmir question lay in talks alone.
Noting that Kashmiris were losing lives on the borders and in hinterland, civilians or security personnel, she said she was happy that both the opposition and the ruling parties in the state favoured dialogue for conflict resolution.

BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, who is party in-charge of J&K affairs, is learnt to have talked to Ms Mufti on the phone and told her that terrorism and talks cannot go together. India has never shied from talking to Pakistan but they (Pakistan) have to create a congenial atmosphere first, he is reported to have said.

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