Mehbooba said she would take up the issue with senior security officials in the meeting of the unified command in Srinagar on Tuesday
Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Monday implored Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pick up threads from where former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee had left and contain 'motormouth' Bharatiya Janata Party ministers in Jammu and Kashmir coalition government to arrest the fast deteriorating situation in the Valley.
Mehbooba's meeting with PM Modi and later Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh came against the backdrop of unprecedented scale of stone-pelting in the Valley and an equally worrisome backlash against Kashmiris, particularly students, living in other states. The vexed issue of Pakistan-based social media groups playing a dangerous role in instigating violence was also discussed threadbare in the meetings.
Mehbooba said she would take up the issue with senior security officials in the meeting of the unified command in Srinagar on Tuesday.
Sources close to the CM said that Modi was in sync with Mehbooba on most of the issues and told her that the solution to all the problems of the state lies in the twin objective of dialogue and development, and that all efforts would be made to achieve it.
Mehbooba, who had one to one meeting with Modi, later said dialogue was the only way ahead for unbundling the knots of mistrust and uncertainty in the state and herald it back to a level of prosperity and welfare it once enjoyed.
But how Centre will respond to Mehbooba's demand to follow Vajpayee's path and initiate dialogue with the separatists, including the hardline Hurriyat faction led by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, remains anybody's guess.
Earlier, the Modi government had taken the hard line of not inviting any separatist leaders and let them take a call to meet Central leadership on their own account. The experiment failed miserably with no separatist leader approaching Rajnath Singh and even the parliamentary delegation during their Kashmir visit.
Modi is understood to have assured Mehbooba of designating nodal officers in various state governments, who would be in constant touch with the J&K government to address the problems of harassment faced by Kashmiri students and help them stay and study in educational institutions.
Mehbooba also sought compensation to the state for the losses suffered due to the Indus Water Treaty. She informed Modi that the recurring losses to the State due to non usage of waters of its rivers for agriculture, power and irrigation have gone beyond Rs. 30 thousand crore as the treaty does not allow storage of river waters by the State.
The PM assured the Chief Minister that the demand would be properly addressed by finding out ways and means to see how the State could be properly compensated, sources said.
Immediately after the meeting, BJP's point person in J&K, Ram Madhav played down rift in the BJP-PDP alliance by calling it 'lack of communication' between the two parties.
"There is no rift. There is some issue regarding the MLC elections. We noticed that there lack of communication between the two parties,\" said Ram Madhav adding that these issues will be addressed and dealt with.
The main priority of the government is to bring normalcy to the valley in one or two months. All possible help is being extended to the state administration, said Madhav.
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