NEW DELHI, June 1: As senior Kashmiri resistance leaders prepared on Wednesday to travel to Muzaffarabad amid Indian squeamishness a lot of confusion was seen in their ranks. Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party chief Shabbir Shah virtually ruled himself out from the landmark journey by insisting in Indian travel forms that his nationality was “Kashmiri” and that he was travelling to a place called “Azad Kashmir”.

It seems miffed Indian officials refused to issue him a passport as also to a handful of his party men. Moreover, an Indian foreign ministry spokesman was evidently surprised to know that the remaining leaders would be making the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad journey not on the prescribed bus but by individual cars.

Sources said Mr Shah and his men could have got away by mentioning Muzaffarabad as their destination and Srinagar as his place of departure. The two other leaders making the journey from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad and thence to Islamabad and onward are Mirwaiz Maulvi Umar Farooq, who is leading what could be considered the main delegation of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and Yasin Malik of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. Unlike Mr Shah and Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the one who fell by the wayside even earlier, both Maulvi Umar and Mr Malik have travelled abroad with Indian passports in recent months. Obviously they did not have difficulty in signing the columns as Indian nationals regardless of their private thoughts on the issue.

Mr Shah’s spokesman told Dawn from Srinagar that he was unlikely to travel to the huge welcome awaiting the delegation across from the Kaman Post on Thursday, unless the Indian government takes a more lenient view by Thursday morning.

“The position of the government is that it is willing to consider request for travel by any Indian national to Muzaffarabad and other parts across the Line of Control (LoC) by the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna told reporters. “If some Hurriyat leaders have been invited to travel to Islamabad, as reported, outside the provision of the above understanding, the onus for this lies with the Pakistani authorities,” he said.

One Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s plans not to travel by the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus but by his private vehicle, the spokesman said.