Muzaffarabad Chalo – Shauk se

Omar Abdullah has decided to quit blogging.

I am going back to being an old school politician and you can read what I think in the newspapers

Mr. Abdullah’s volte face comes after these remarks he made in his penultimate blog post.

Lets get the Governor to pass an ordinance to make the Chairman of the SASB also a state subject if it helps with the conduct of the yatra and then let the SASB conduct next year?s yatra with as much land and facilities as they require, facilities created at the expense not of the SASB but of the state government and see if this satisfies the yatris who come from all over the country. We?ll conduct a survey of every single yatri, independently and impartially to determine his or her reaction to the facilities and if even after this the need is felt to reduce the yatra to 800 kanals of land I?m sure that a case can be made to trade 800 kanals for the 3200 or more kanals of land that won?t be used in the future.

Lets give this a chance and see if it works. What?s a year in time compared to a dismembered J&K because if this tension continues I fear that is where we are headed – a division of our state on communal lines.

Mr. Abdullah must be having more than abuse on his blog on mind as he regresses into old school politics, for his colleagues across the separatist and almost separatist section of Kashmir politics are preparing to cross over the LoC into PoK.

“Muzaffarabad Chalo” seems to be the clarion call.

“The PDP has decided to join the march to Muzaffarabad on Monday, the call for which has been given by fruit growers association,” party president Mehbooba Mufti said here.

The Hurriyat Conference as well as other separatist outfits have announced that they would march to Muzaffarabad tomorrow to “counter the economic blockade” of the valley.

The PDP president said opening up of the road between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad along with other links like Suchetgarh-Sialkote, Rawakot-Poonch and Kargil-Skardu offered a “win-win” opportunity to India, Pakistan and the people of the state.

This move to cross the LoC has got gutless wonder Shivraj Patil all worked up.

Patil also urged fruit growers not to go ahead with their threatened march across the Line of Control (LoC) to Pakistan-administered Kashmir capital Muzaffarabad to sell their produce.

?Such a step would be wrong for both the fruit growers and the country,? he said after an all-party central delegation led by him reviewed the situation in the Kashmir Valley and interacted with politicians here.

?But then Mr. Patil is missing the point when he fails to notice the abject silence on the subject from Islamabad.

In fact the only voice on the subject from the other side of the border is that of PoK Leader Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan who’s opinion is probably about as consequential as Pervez Musharraf’s the way things stand right now in Pakistan.

Offstumped Bottomline: As the nation prepares for the long haul in its quest for a solution to the people’s movement in Jammu, it must call the separatist’s bluff on Muzaffarabad. The government must take the wind off the Hurriyat-PDP combine’s sails by allowing anyone desirous of crossing over the LoC permission to do so. Let this be a litmus test of how serious Pakistan is about allowing Indian Citizens free access to its share of Kashmir’s spoils. The Indian Army sentinels meanwhile must make no distinction between any cross border infiltration and illegal border crossings from Pok to J&K.

Filed under: War on Terror, amarnath controversy