The killing of Abdul Ghani Lone, a veteran leader of the All-Parties Hurriyat Conference, is a severe blow to the incipient peace process in Jammu and Kashmir. In recent months, Lone had emerged as a voice of moderation and sanity and had demonstrated tremendous personal courage. There was also evidence to suggest that Lone may have been willing to arrive at a political accommodation with New Delhi in the months to come. The biggest challenge now for the government of India is to ensure that the killing of Lone does not silence other similar Kashmir voices, who may have been willing to be part of a peace process in the state and possibly participate in the forthcoming elections to the legislative assembly. Lone's son, Mr Sajad Lone, has claimed that Pakistan and the Inter-Services Intelligence are responsible for his father's murder. Indeed, even while security agencies investigate the assassination, it is clear that forces in Pakistan seem determined to subvert any process of reconciliation between New Delhi and Kashmiri separatist leaders. While Lone's own political trajectory was far from consistent, there is no doubt that at most times he articulated the aspirations and concerns of the ordinary Kashmiri. Lone began his political career in the Congress, at a time when the state was ruled by the Congress chief minister, Mr Ghulam Nabi Sadiq. As a cabinet minister, Lone stood out as an efficient administrator and grass roots leader with a powerful constituency in the Handwara region of Kashmir. When Sheikh Abdullah returned to power in 1977, Lone flirted with the short-lived Janata experiment. Thereafter, Lone seemed to drift politically, until he found his own outfit, the People's Conference. During the initial years of the militancy in the early Nineties, the People's Conference too boasted of its own armed outfit. And when the APHC was set up, the People's Conference became part of the umbrella separatist alliance and Lone a member of the executive committee. Lone was amongst the first Kashmiri separatist leaders to recognize that the indigenous political movement had been hijacked by Pakistan and that the fate of the Kashmiris was of little concern to Islamabad. During his visit to Pakistan last year, Lone was strident in his condemnation of jihadi forces and foreign militants who, he argued, had brought havoc and devastation to Kashmir. Similarly, Lone was fiercely opposed to giving a religious tinge to the political struggle of the Kashmiri people, and this had brought him in direct opposition to the Jamaat-e-Islami's hardline leader, Mr Ali Shah Geelani. Last month, at a conference in Dubai, Lone is believed to have told his Pakistani interlocutors that it was time that they stopped interfering in Kashmir and that the gun had no longer any role to play in the politics of Kashmir. For his forthrightness and his moderate views, Lone had become a target of extremist groups and their backers. They may have succeeded in eliminating him but it will be difficult to extinguish his ideas or his message that emphasized the necessity for a dialogue and a process of reconciliation. The challenge for New Delhi and Srinagar is to ensure that this political legacy of Lone translates into a mass movement for peace. That would be a fitting tribute to Lone.