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Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Mehbooba Mufti during a meeting in New Delhi on Monday. PTI Photo[/caption]
New Delhi, April 24 (PTI): Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Monday said the prime minister appears amenable to holding talks with stake holders in a bid to arrest the deteriorating situation in the Valley. However, she cautioned, that “an atmosphere needs to be created” for a dialogue.
“Talks cannot happen amid stone pelting and firing of bullets,” she told reporters after a 20-minute meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his residence.
At the meeting, she invoked former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s policy on Kashmir, and said the thread should be picked up from where he had left off -- an apparent suggestion for talks with separatists.
Kashmir is in the grip of increased violence since the April 9 by-poll for the Srinagar Lok Sabha constituency. The security forces are under intense pressure as they are faced with almost daily protests and stone-pelting.
“Talks are the only option,” Mehbooba said.”How long can you have a confrontation?”
“We need to start from where Vajpayee ji had left, otherwise there is no scope of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir improving,” she said. Referring to the increase in stone-pelting incidents in the Valley, she said there were some young people who were “disillusioned” while some were being “instigated”, often through the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Whatsapp.
Rising tensions between the coalition partners, the PDP and the BJP, over the handling of the security situation in Kashmir also came up at the meeting.
The coalition also came under strain when the PDP lost a seat in the recently held MLC polls when an independent MLA voted in favour of BJP candidate Vikram Randhawa, leading to his victory.
“Whatever happened should not have taken place. But this is an internal matter and we will resolve it with the BJP,” she said.
She also raised the Indus water treaty issue, saying it was causing a huge loss of Rs 20,000 crore to the state. She said the prime minister assured her that efforts would be made to see how the state would be compensated for this.
The Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister said the situation in Kashmir would be discussed in a meeting of the Unified Command tomorrow.
