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Journalism of Courage
Disagreements within the team of Central interlocutors to Jammu and Kashmir have now reached the point where working together appears to be an impossibility. Though they have submitted an interim report,the friction and acrimony within the team has stalled their work and damaged their sheen in the Valley and outside. After one of the members,M.M. Ansari,criticised his colleagues Dileep Padgaonkar and Radha Kumar for attending conferences and seminars abroad organised by prominent ISI-funded persons,the team has pretty much fallen apart.
This three-member team of interlocutors was put together after a successful all-party meet in Kashmir last year,after the Valley convulsed in violent,stone-pelting protest,a media-savvy resistance that caught the worlds imagination. It was explicitly set up as a new kind of listening team,one that was prepared to truly enlarge the discourse because they were not tied to unbudging official positions. Instead of swooping down to the state after individual incidents,like shallow fact-finding missions do,it was meant to spend a sustained stretch of time,understanding the various facets of the problem and evolving the beginning of a solution.
However,that project foundered right at the start,when these voluble interlocutors began broadcasting every new development in their research and meetings. They have met nearly 600 delegations and roughly 5,000 people across the troubled region. They rediscovered,aloud,the various angles to the Kashmir issue,the comparative merits of different points in the autonomy-integration spectrum; and they caused great consternation among various political camps wedded to one or the other option. The home minister decisively ended this season of press conferences,reminding them that ball-to-ball commentary on their own actions was not the appropriate way to handle one of the most gnarled,bitter conflicts in the world,and would only be taken out of context by various interested parties. But by confusing their own mandate,speaking in different voices and then being stuck with this junketeering controversy,the interlocutors have eroded their own credibility and squandered yet another chance to respond with imagination and empathy in Kashmir.
