The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and its global and regional fallout have forced the All-Party Hurriyat Conference (APHC) to rethink its Kashmir strategy. Its decision to seek people's mandate to prove its representative character indicates that the conglomerate has understood the limitations of the gun culture spawned by various militant formations. Last month, the Kashmiri separatist outfit had drawn a two-pronged strategy: of reaching out to foreign diplomats and Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee. This amounted to a major shift in Hurriyat's earlier stand ruling out talks with the Centre before an interaction with Pak-based jehadi groups. Hurriyat's decision to hold talks with foreign diplomats was primarily aimed at balancing the proposed meeting with Vajpayee. Cadres had to hurriedly leave for Srinagar in view of the large scale arrests back home.
This kind of backing and filling indicates Hurriyat and the Kashmir crisis-mongers have been pushed onto the defensive. They probably don't have a lot of confidence in the gun bunnies achieving anything other than the traditional piles of corpses. Even worse, some of the corpses could be their own. They're going to try and work a deal. |