Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party leader Shabir Shah on Wednesday refused to participate in talks with the Centre's new interlocutor, N N Vohra.
"Vohra's nomination as the Centre's pointman and his way of holding talks is non-serious. We have refused to meet Vohra as the move is nothing as compared to previous attempts," a spokesman of the JKDFP said.
He, however, said his party would not only continue to make efforts to solve the Kashmir issue, but would respond positively to any move initiated by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
While Shah chose to stay away, a delegation of the Jammu and Kashmir Awami National Party met Vohra for nearly an hour.
Emerging from the meeting, party general secretary Mohammad Shafi said Kashmir is a political dispute that needs to be resolved through a dialogue and any headway in this direction can be made only if the Centre stops harping on Kashmir being an integral part of India.
"We impressed upon him the need for holding the intra-Kashmir conference so that people of the state can hammer out a possible solution to the long-standing dispute," he said.
The editor of Srinagar Times, a local Urdu daily, and Member of the Legislative Council Sofi Ghulam Mohammad also met Vohra.
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