In a shift in the Centre’s stand, Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani today said the Government was not averse to talking to the Hurriyat Conference. So far he had steadfastly maintained that since the Hurriyat had not contested elections and its leaders were not representatives of the people, the Centre would not talk to them.However, a day after Hurriyat leaders Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Yasin Malik met Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, the DyPM said there was ‘‘no harm in talking to them.’’ But he made it clear that any negotiation would be only through N N Vohra, the newly-appointed interlocutor for the state, and that there was no need for him to meet them. He also categorically ruled out any trilateral talks involving Pakistan, as Hurriyat had earlier demanded. Explaining the sudden change of heart, he said the Government was ‘‘willing to talk to people who may subscribe to separatism but are not engaged in violence. We are interested in finding a solution.’’‘‘We have talked to the Bodos after Bodo Liberation Tigers (BLT) agreed to leave violence and come to the negotiating table. In J&K, legitimate grievances of people have to be addressed,’’ Advani said. Vohra had met Advani twice before going to Jammu last fortnight for a familiarisation visit to the state. ‘‘He asked me if he should talk to Hurriyat. I told him to go ahead if they asked him to,’’ he added.Most problems in the state generally related to the measure of autonomy the state had, Advani said, hinting that more steps were in the offing for J&K. In a free-wheeling conversation with mediapersons en route to Goa for Western Command naval exercises, the DyPM said there was a ‘‘clear case for devolution of power’’ in the state. Preferring to use the word ‘‘devolution’’, instead of ‘‘autonomy’’, he said the people of Jammu and Ladakh had a grievance that all powers were concentrated in the Valley, that is Srinagar.‘‘With a re-arrangement of the New Delhi-Srinagar relationship, we would simultaneously also have to think of altered relationships between Srinagar and Jammu, and Srinagar and Leh,’’ he said. Otherwise too, he said, the Government believed that over the past few decades the Indian federation had become ‘‘over-centralised’’ and devolution was necessary in states like J&K, and the North-east, especially Nagaland.Patting the NDA Government on its back, he said there were three main planks on which it worked. ‘‘Secularism, democracy and national unity. And they are all related to national security. Our strength has been an honest commitment to these values and refusal to surrender to vote-bank politics,’’ he added.
