London--When Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao meets her Pakistani counterpart on Thursday, she is aiming, she says, to find a "graduated" way back into talks broken off after the November 2008 attack on Mumbai. But before any progress can be made, the two countries have to agree not just which subjects should be covered -- India wants to focus on terrorism, Pakistan on Kashmir -- but even what is the right forum for dialogue. India and Pakistan have struggled for years to find the best approach to talks. Unscripted summits have ended in failure; formal dialogue has become bogged down in bureaucracy; secret back-channel talks went unrecorded and failed to carry subsequent governments or public opinion along with them. So Thursday's talks between Rao, India's top diplomat, and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir are likely to be more about finding a framework for dialogue than making peace. "We hope we can build, in a graduated manner, better communication and a serious and responsive dialogue to address issues of concern between our two countries," Rao told a conference hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London on Monday. Rao said the "essential focus" of the talks would be on persuading Pakistan to dismantle militant groups behind attacks on India. "Terror groups ... continue to recruit, train and plot attacks from safe havens across our borders," she said. But she also said India "would like to keep the door to dialogue open" and acknowledged that Kashmir was an issue which needed to be discussed bilaterally. Analysts say Thursday's talks could be a stepping stone to further discussions between the foreign secretaries and perhaps pave the way for a meeting between their prime ministers on the sidelines of a South Asian regional summit in Bhutan in April. "Delhi is approaching these talks with a lot of caution," said IISS South Asia expert Rahul Roy-Chaudhury. "I think there will be clearly a sense that these talks should continue. We are going to see, if there is a joint statement, a very cautious joint statement," he said. Some see talks as cushioning the impact of any fresh Mumbai-style attack on India which might tip the nuclear-armed countries into war, as well as helping to ease deep mutual distrust about each other's involvement in Afghanistan. The big question, even before listing the many contentious issues, is how they structure the talks. India's approach to Pakistan has traditionally been driven by the prime minister so talks between Rao and Bashir can at best play only a supporting role, with real progress widely believed to require bold moves by the political leadership. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh -- who like his predecessor Atal Behari Vajpayee is keen for a breakthrough on Pakistan -- was criticized by his own party for moving too fast last year to repair relations soured by the Mumbai attack. As a result, he is expected to be more cautious when he next meets Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani than during their last informal talks in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in July. Ill-prepared meetings have ended in disaster in the past, notably a summit in Agra -- home of the Taj Mahal -- in 2001 when then Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf tried to leapfrog his officials to reach a peace deal with Vajpayee. Pakistan is keen for a resumption of the composite dialogue, a formal -- and some argue overly bureaucratic -- peace process meant to cover all issues of contention between it and India. But this process is looking dated as new causes of tension -- from Afghanistan to the sharing of Himalayan river waters which run through Kashmir -- rise to the top of the agenda. On the Indian side, said Roy-Chaudhury, there was a sense that the composite dialogue was not the best forum any more. "That decision still hasn't been reached." Under Musharraf, Pakistan and India also held secret back-channel talks which sketched out a plan to bring peace to Kashmir. Musharraf, now living in exile in London, said this month these talks worked "extremely efficiently" and they had been close to an agreement to solve the Kashmir dispute. But Foreign Minister Shah Mehmoud Qureshi disowned the deal by telling reporters he knew nothing about it and there was no record of it, according to Pakistan's Dawn newspaper. Those familiar with the talks are sceptical the deal would have worked, and one source said Musharraf had done little to bring others in Pakistan on board in what was very much a two-man show led by him and his special envoy Tariq Aziz. Qureshi has named diplomat Mohammad Riaz Khan to replace Aziz as a special envoy for talks with India's Satinder Lambah. But there have been mixed reports about whether the two have even met yet, let alone begun the kind of back-channel talks that might prepare the ground for their country's leaders.
