Thaindian News

Jammu, Oct 12 (IANS) People across Jammu Wednesday said they hoped for a “fair deal” in the report submitted by the three interlocutors appointed by the central government to carry out extensive dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir and suggest a future course of action.

The interlocutors submitted their report to union Home Minister P. Chidambaram Wednesday, but there was no official word on its contents.

Shamsher Singh, the president of the state unit of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), said: “We cannot give our reaction until we know the details of the report. We are left confused because at times the interlocutors appeared to favour our standpoint and times they vehemently differed.”

He added that the BJP could only hope that Jammu region gets its fair deal and is delivered out of the “discriminations it has been suffering for years”.

A Jammu and Kashmir National Pathers Party legislator also voiced similar opinion.

“We can only hope that justice would be done with Jammu region on political, social, developmental and economic fronts,” he said.

However, the opinion on the streets was a bit more grim.

“We do not have any hope from such exercises. It is a foregone conclusion that all this will lead to further appeasement of Kashmiris,” said Ravinder Sharma, 48, a cloth merchant in Raghunath Bazaar.

Anjali Gupta, a law student of the Jammu University, said: “We are a condemned lot and this report will suggest more appeasement for Kashmiris.”

The interlocutors — journalist Dileep Padgoankar, academic Radha Kumar and former civil servant M.M. Ansari — were appointed Oct 13 last year, when the Kashmir situation had turned grim following street protests which had left more than 100 youths dead.