Two weeks before the scheduled second round of New Delhi-Hurriyat talks, JKLF chairman Yasin Malik today broke his silence, demanding a seat for Kashmiris at the negotiating table, alongside India and Pakistan.Malik chose the neutral ground after the Hurriyat split between the moderates and hardliners but has been against the dialogue for, what he sees, as failure to include Kashmiris in the talks.Malik’s demand came a day after the chairman of the breakaway Hurriyat faction, Syed Ali Shah Geelani, said talks with New Delhi without involving the UN or a friendly country were in contravention of the Hurriyat’s constitution. While Geelani has stressed the role of the UN in hammering out a solution, Malik has stuck to his stand that Kashmiris must be involved in the process.‘‘What kind of peace is it if Kashmiris are excluded from the process? Kashmiris should be recognised as a main party to the dispute and given a seat at the negotiating table,’’ Malik said in a telephonic lecture to students of the University of California, Berkeley. ‘‘Kashmir is not a territorial dispute. It is about the future and survival of people of Jammu and Kashmir. The peace process set afoot between India and Pakistan does not include the people of the state as yet.’’ As many as one million people from three districts of Kashmir have signed the petition endorsing the JKLF’s stand, he said.The JKLF chairman rejected PM Vajpayee’s views that those elected through the J-K Assembly are representatives of the Kashmiris. According to the Election Commission, he said, the ruling state government has garnered only 281,000 votes from the entire state. ‘‘I ask Vajpayee, as a poet and an artist, how can he say that India has won the democratic battle just because polls were conducted in which people of Kashmir participated?’’ he said. A democratic mechanism was the best way to decide what Kashmiris seek and who should represent them, he said, quoting opinion polls of various international channels and newspapers saying ‘‘80 per cent of people favoured re-unification and restoration of Jammu and Kashmir as an independent state’’.He blamed global powers for neglecting the ‘‘non-violent movement of Kashmiris and accused them of having security interests with Pakistan and economic interests with India”. The international community is ‘‘morally bankrupt for the criminal silence over the murder of one lakh Kashmiris’’, he said. ‘‘And worse, they are being dubbed as terrorists and India as a victim.Since we declared a ceasefire in 1994, more than 600 of my colleagues were killed.’’
