NEW DELHI, Aug 24: Inder Kumar Gujral feels that the situation has decisively turned the corner in Jammu and Kashmir and this is the first time that a Prime Minister has made such an assertion about the troubled State in the recent years. ``We have definitely crossed the hump,'' he said.This was Gujral's assessment while returning from his one-day trip to Srinagar on Friday and he said so in a chat with scribes on board his aircraft. Gujral went to the Valley on Friday for the valedictory function of the two day whips' conference which was organised in Jammu and Kashmir this year.Previous Prime Ministers have normally not attended the conferences of the party whips but Gujral went there as if to underscore the point that the State is now over the hump as he put it. In October, the FICCI is organising an all India conference in the State.There were several signs of normalcy in Srinagar, even though this correspondent was there only for a day and went there as part of the Press party accompanying the Prime Minister. Moving around the city for a couple of hours without officials, it was clear that there is relaxation of tension in the State capital. Though there was a hartal in protest against the Prime Minister's visit, there were people on the roads and children playing in the playgrounds. In the evening many shops had pulled up their shutters downed in the morning.Going around in a shikara on the Dal Lake, a couple of Kashmiri women hailed us from their houseboat to ask whether we would like tea. This was unthinkable some months ago. Not far away we could see three foreigners sitting on top of a houseboat - `New Colombo', chatting away. This was also a sight uncommon in recent years. The shikara owner told us that this summer tourists had come after a gap of seven years and business was slowly starting to pick up. Moving around the Dal Lake, with weeds and encroachers having strengthened their stranglehold and the number of floating islands having increased, we could see foreign tourists and honeymooning couples from other parts of India in other shikaras plying around.Though the shops were shut on Residency Road, some of them had been painted fresh and carpenters were at work in several others, which were signs of the readiness of local traders getting ready to reinvest money in their businesses. The owner of an ISD-STD booth, who is also a Congressman, said that after a long time people had begun to talk to him about their problems. Young girls could be seen moving around in firans or salwar kameez but without a veil, even though some militant organisations had threatened dire action if they did not cover their faces.
