Vohra chosen as Centre’s man to talk peace in J-K

Vohra has got the coveted job even as former interlocutor K C Pant and A S Dulat, Advisor to Prime Minister’s Office on Kashmir were in the race.

According to sources, Vohra may be given the status of a minister of state though K C Pant, the earlier interlocuter, held the rank of a Cabinet minister. The government is yet to spell terms of reference for Vohra’s new job but Advani today hinted that insurgents would not be excluded from talks. He told the Rajya sabha that ‘‘Vohra will hold discussion with the elected representatives and other groups.’’

Advani said Vohra and the state government would decide how to go about the negotiations. ‘‘Political negotiations would come up at a later stage.’’ Advani said. Although Hurriyat Conference seems to be out of favour, the Centre, right now eems to keep other options open.

Vohra’s nomination was generally received well in political circles in Kashmir and elsewhere. Kashmir’s chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who had consented to Vohra’s name to Advani, rated him as a ‘‘right person for the right job.’’ An Punjab cadre IAS officer of the 1959 batch Vohra has served on key positions as defence secretary and principal secy to PM Inder Kumar Gujaral.

Vohra, unlike Pant and Arun Jaitley, has the advantage of starting his Kashmir innings on a clean slate. He was never linked to the vexed problem directly nor does he have any political leanings.

Back in J-K, the ruling PDP sources told he Indian Express that hardly anybody in the Mufti camp expected an olive branch from the Centre at this stage. ‘‘It has certainly come as a surprise especially at this particular juncture when several states are going to polls,’’ a senior PDP leader said. ‘‘The BJP had taken a much more hawkish line on issues like dialogue and turned Kashmir into a poll issue. They (the BJP) were even blaming our government to be soft on separatists and their eyes were only on electoral gains in the comming assembly polls in several states’’.

Terming the appointment of Vohra as ‘‘very good news’’, he said that ‘‘dialogue is an essence of democracy’’ and hoped that ‘‘it will lead to an end to the violence and accelerate the process of normalisation in the state’’. This surprise olive branch from Centre could have never come on much appropriate time for Mufti and his PDP — who are facing a by-election in Pampore constituency, where the PDP legislator Abdul Aziz Mir was assasinated by the militants. In fact, this election is seen as a litmus test for the Mufti’s performance and the results will exhibit whether the graph of his party’s popularity is still inatct or not.