NEW DELHI, March 18: A faction of Kashmir's All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), headed by Maulana Abbas Ansari, will be in a bind next week over an invitation by New Delhi to hold a second round of talks with Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani
, the group's officials said on Thursday.
The officials, who requested anonymity, told Dawn from Srinagar that an executive council meeting of APHC on Saturday would be followed by a wider general council meeting on Monday before a decision is taken on whether to go for the propsoed March 27 talks with Mr Advani.
"The position is that we want very earnestly to hold talks," one member of Mr Ansari's Executive Council said. "But we must also be resolute, if we want to have a meaningful dialogue, to ensure that our promise not to compromise on human rights violation by Indian security forces is respected by the Indian government."
The Indian government had earlier this week sent a simple invitation to Mr Ansari to hold a second round of talks. It was disaptched a day after Mr Advani expressed enthusiasm for the dialogue to resume.
Mr Ansari's faction, which claims the support of 16 parties from the original 23 that formed the APHC, has been under attack by hardliners for holding talks with Mr Advani when New Delhi had apparently done nothing to check human rights violations in Kashmir.
In fact last month, the faction had announced suspension of talks with New Delhi accusing it of being 'insincere' and said that the process would resume only if the government ended 'human rights violation' in Jammu and Kashmir.
"The dialogue process with the government is in suspension because there is no evidence of sincerity and seriousness on their part," Mr Ansari had proclaimed. It seems Mr Ansari was leaning on a promise by Mr Advani, considered a hawk on Kashmir and Pakistan, that India would seek to end human rights violations in the state in February.
But Mr Ansari later noted that there had been no perceptible change in the ground situation by the end of last month. Hardliners have been attacking Mr Ansari for various issues, chiefly for not taking up the alleged killing of five civilians by security forces in Bandipore seriously.
Indian Foreign Secretary Shashank on Thursday gave a glimpse of India's philosophy on the issue, a view that seems to be in consonance with the ground reality in Kashmir.
"Among Mahatma Gandhi's greatest influences on the leaders of our freedom struggle was the precept that it was not good enough to have a good objective, it was equally important that the means of attaining those objectives were good; means were always as important as ends," he told a Human Rights Conference in Geneva on Thursday.
But, Mr Shashank went on to add: "Human rights cannot be used as an instrument of foreign policy. Measures that we adopt have to be proportional to the infirmities that they seek to address".
"Today states are confronted with the challenge from terrorism. Ensuring the security of its people is the first responsibility of a government, and the state is the first line of defence against terrorism.
"At the same time, counter-terrorism measures should preserve the rule of law, protect human rights and sustain democracy," Mr Shashank said. Back home, Mr Ansari's problems seem to have been compounded, and certainly not eased by the threat from the hard-line breakaway APHC faction of Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who has promised to launch a campaign to boycott the Indian parliamentary elections due in Kashmir next month.
This is the sensitive topic that will be touched upon by the general council, if not the executive council of the APHC's faction headed by Mr Abbas Ansari when it meets on Saturday and Monday.
