Home Minister Rajnath Singh to hold a press conference in Srinagar at 11 am today: ANI

An all-party delegation of lawmakers led by Rajnath reached Srinagar on Sunday on a peace-finding mission but immediately came up against a hurdle: key separatist leaders refused to meet it, saying the team's mandate was unclear.

On the first day of its two-day visit, the lawmakers met around 200 stakeholders, including members of the civil society, academics, teachers and fruit and saffron growers. But separatist groups weren't among the 30 delegations that met the 26 lawmakers.

"One fails to understand what hope to attach with a delegation which has not spelled out its mandate for any engagement on a clear agenda," separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Mohammad Yasin Malik said in a joint statement.

"These methods of crisis management through parliamentary delegations and track-II cant take the place of a genuine transparent agenda-based dialogue to address the core issue... That has been our consistent stand and has been spelled out recently as well in our letters to various international and global fora, the statement said.