After the hiccups that eventually led to the deletion of its reference to Kashmir, the SAARC Parliamentarians’ meet thwarted an attempt to advocate the involvement of the people of J-K as third party in the Indo-Pak talks at a conference here of SAARC MPs and journalists. It also hoped for “a final settlement of the J-K question” in an atmosphere free of violence and terrorism.

The Indian representatives, led by Dinesh Trivedi a Trinamool Congress MP, had raised serious objections on Sunday to references of Kashmir in the draft. Later, a committee re-examined the issue and unanimously decided to drop the reference, broadly sticking to the Bhurban Declaration of the South-Asian Parliament-I.

Clarifying the position K K Katyal and Imitiaz Alam, President and Secretary General of SAFMA respectively, said Kashmir was not mentioned in the draft, but it came up only as an additional point after one of the committees proposed it for deliberations.

“Kashmir is a bilateral issue and requires no third party intervention. We only hope for normalisation of Indo-Pak bilateral relations while implementing their joint statements of January 6, 2004, September 24, 2004, April 18, 2005 and Havana Statement in April, 2006 in their letter and spirit,” Alam said quoting the final Declaration document.