Srinagar: Hurriyat chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq on Friday (August 1) called on the BJP-led Union government to engage with the political leadership of Jammu and Kashmir.In his Friday sermon at the historic Jamia Masjid, Mirwaiz, who heads the moderate faction of the Hurriyat Conference, said that the BJP-led government should take steps to address the ‘dil ki doori’ (emotional disconnection) between New Delhi and Kashmir.“Neither war, nor violence, nor the use of force can solve problems,” Mirwaiz said, referring to ‘Operation Sindoor’, in which more than a dozen civilians lost their lives in Jammu and Kashmir after Pakistan retaliated with heavy firing of artillery and mortar shells along border villages.The term ‘dil ki doori’ has often been used in Kashmir context to describe the years of mistrust between the regional parties in the valley and the Union government, which historians trace back to the events of colonial rule of Jammu and Kashmir and the political turbulence caused by the partition.Mirwaiz had been part of the Track-II dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad on Kashmir when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government was in power in the early 2000s.His call for dialogue between the Kashmiri leadership and the Union government comes at a time when the repeated pleas made by chief minister Omar Abdullah for the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood appear to be going unheard in New Delhi.The Hurriyat leader said that the only path to “peace and prosperity, which the billions of people in the Indian subcontinent seek and the swathes of poor in this region deserve”, is through dialogue.“Engagement at all levels is a far cheaper and evolved alternative,” Mirwaiz, who is also the chief cleric of Kashmir, said while delivering his weekly sermon at the Jamia Masjid in downtown Srinagar, which was an epicentre of anti-India and pro-freedom sentiment in Kashmir in the years before Article 370 was read down.Referring to the debate in the parliament on ‘Operation Sindoor’, which targeted suspected terrorist bases in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan on May 7, Mirwaiz regretted that “very few” parliamentarians spoke about the implication of the military strikes across the border on Jammu and Kashmir.The Hurriyat leader said that the lack of a larger debate on the human cost of the military skirmishes, which was paid by the people of Jammu and Kashmir, “reflects the mindset and mood of the times”.‘Operation Sindoor’ was prompted by the terrorist attack in Pahalgam in which 25 Hindu men and a local Kashmiri Muslim were shot dead on April 22 this year.Earlier this week, security forces claimed to have gunned down three suspected Lashkar-e-Tayyaba militants, all Pakistanis, who were involved in the attack.In rare praise for pro-India political players, Mirwaiz said that the three Lok Sabha MPs from Kashmir – Mian Altaf Larvi and Syed Aga Ruhullah from the National Conference and the incarcerated chief of the Awami Ittehad Party Engineer Rashid – “were the only ones to highlight the deep concerns and plight of the people”.Mirwaiz said that the three MPs spoke with “passion and pain about the disempowerment and dispossession of the people of Jammu and Kashmir”. He said that they expressed the “sentiments of the people of Jammu and Kashmir that we have all along been talking about”.“It is good to see that on these matters all are on the same page,” he said.Mirwaiz added: “One can only hope that what they said was heard by those in power in New Delhi, and if they really want to lessen ‘dil ki doori’, they must pay heed to it.”For the second week in a row, Mirwaiz, who has often been detained at his Srinagar home by Jammu and Kashmir’s police administration in the years after the reading down of Article 370, was allowed to deliver his sermon at the historic mosque.Last month, the Hurriyat leader was put under detention for two consecutive Fridays as part of a wider crackdown on political leaders who were planning to commemorate Martyrs’ Day on July 13.