ISLAMABAD, June 12: Moderate Kashmiri leaders from Indian-held Kashmir said on Sunday the stage to take up options to resolve the 57-year-old Kashmir issue had not yet come and Pakistani leadership had not offered them a ready solution during talks between the two sides.

All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and some other members of his nine-man delegation told a symposium that they were still exploring the mode of their participation in the peace process already going on between Pakistan and India.

They also said they would be going to New Delhi for talks with the Indian leadership after the present visit.

The symposium on “Kashmir: looking towards the future” was the second organised by the Dawn group of newspapers in collaboration with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Pakistan Peace Coalition and the Islamabad Council of World Affairs.

It was also addressed by pro-independence Jammu-Kashmir Liberation Front chairman Mohammad Yaseen Malik, former APHC chairman Prof Abdul Ghani Bhat and People’s Conference chief Bilal Ghani Lone.

“I don’t think we have reached that stage,” Mr Farooq said while referring to the talk of various options about the future status of the divided Jammu and Kashmir state in the event of a settlement.

Stressing that the first requirement was making Kashmiris a party to the issue, he said his delegation’s present visit to Azad Kashmir and Pakistan indicated that New Delhi too now recognized that necessity as Islamabad had already done.

Mr Farooq referred to what he called “very honest discussion” with President Pervez Musharraf in Islamabad and with other Pakistani and Azad Kashmir leaders and said his delegation’s understanding was that “Pakistan doesn’t have a solution to offer to Kashmiri people” and added: “There is no ready-made solution.”

He said the best mode of moving forward could be tripartite talks with India, Pakistan, and Kashmiri leadership sitting on the same table.

But he said since India would not agree to this, the alternative for the moment could be a triangular dialogue with Kashmiris talking to both Pakistan and India separately and Pakistan and India talking between themselves.

The APHC leader referred to a visit by him to the United States and talks with officials and think tanks there and said the international community seemed to be concerned about Kashmir but not in a hurry.

But he said Kashmiris could not afford delay because 15 of them on average were being killed every day and they were impatiently asking “where we have reached” and “whether anything will happen”.

He said some people thought before his delegation’s visit that a solution had already been decided and they would only put their thumb impressions, while some called the move “ghaddari” (treason).

But he rejected the impression by saying “...we are at the same place where we were 57 years ago”. He also said the meaning of “ghaddari” would also have to be reviewed.

Mr Farooq said while think tanks considered up to 35 solutions of the Kashmir problem, including one seeking to make the state a buffer between India and Pakistan, there could be no solution based on the status quo or the Line of Control dividing the region.

He said time had come “to put our heads and minds together and to think...about the future” and made it clear that the APHC recognised the Jammu and Kashmir entity as it existed at the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 with all ethnic and religious communities living together.

In reply to a question, Mr Farooq said the APHC did not take part in elections in the Indian-held Kashmir because of the presence of 700,000-strong Indian forces there and the requirement for candidates to swear allegiance to the Indian constitution that calls Kashmir an integral part of India.

But he said the alliance could contest elections if held under a different dispensation.

However, during his speech, he appeared to be differing with Mr Yasin Malik’s proposal that Indian and Pakistani human rights groups conduct a poll to elect Kashmiri representatives only for the future dialogue.

He said the APHC had never claimed to represent the entire Jammu and Kashmir state but added it did represent the broader spectrum of people who had suffered and struggled while pro-India parties had submitted to the Indian occupation.

Mr Farooq also cited examples from other countries where independence leaders were not asked to contest elections to prove their representative character, including Mahatma Gandhi of India and Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

The JKLF leader said that while both India and Pakistan had their favourites in the state and Kashmiris were accused of being disorganised, the Kashmiri representatives for the talks could be chosen in an election to be held only for this purpose and supervised by “people connected with civil liberties” in India and Pakistan.

He called it the “biggest humiliation of Kashmiri people” that India and Pakistan were discussing Kashmir for two years and taking confidence-building measures without consulting the state people although about 100,000 of them had sacrificed their lives in the freedom struggle.

“These were only fake peace processes... (with Kashmiris being absent from talks),” he said.

“Is it not necessary that every party (to a dispute) must be involved (in the talks) and is it not necessary that every party must be treated equal in status?” he asked.

He was all praise for Pakistani people saying he felt their “heart-beat” and “unconditional romantic feelings” in support of the Kashmiri struggle.

He said Pakistani intellectuals might have similar feelings but he did not see them reflected in their writings.

Prof Bhat said Kashmiris had to be creative and produce ideas about how to move forward in a “dangerous situation” when two nuclear countries were involved in the problem.

He pleaded for the use of Kashmiri wisdom, like Sarwasti brahmins believing in intellectual power, to confront the preference for muscle and money by what he called Lakshami brahmins.

Mr Bhat, who is also the president of Muslim Conference party in Indian-held Kashmir, said while UN resolutions and India-Pakistan talks at other forums failed to resolve the Kashmir issue, a way had to be found because Kashmiris wanted to live in peace and not in “tension for all times to come”.

Referring to the delegation’s meetings with Pakistani leaders, he said: “We talked about the future of Kashmir, about tomorrow, and about coming out of darkness into light.”

Mr Bhat said the delegation had discussed with President Musharraf and others the Kashmir issue in detail, the human rights violations, draconian laws in the Indian-held Kashmir and demilitarization of not only the Siachen glacier “but Kashmir as a whole”.

He said Kashmiris wanted a permanent solution of the problem to ensure a better future for themselves and added it might happen “in a couple of years if all goes well”.