In the coming weeks, the public focus will be on the formal talks between the two governments. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri will be here shortly for a session of the Indo-Pak Joint Commission that he chairs with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon heads to Pakistan next month to kick off the next round of the “composite dialogue” on all bilateral issues at the official level. Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz will be in New Delhi in the first week of April to attend the 14th summit of the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation.

All these meetings will end in customary joint statements. Some colourless agreements on subjects like “nuclear risk reduction” will surely be signed. But the real story of Indo-Pak negotiations is unfolding behind the scenes, in the back channel diplomacy. Manmohan Singh and Pervez Musharraf have apparently taken personal charge of these sensitive negotiations, which by all accounts, have entered a definitive phase.

We have it on the authority of Kasuri that significant progress has occurred in the bilateral negotiations on J&K, and only five persons in Pakistan are aware of the detail. Probably even fewer on the Indian side are involved in these negotiations. The closed nature of these talks on Kashmir does not necessarily mean they are opaque. The broad contours of a settlement on J&K is probably the most open secret in New Delhi and Islamabad. For any one who has carefully analysed the many media interviews of Pervez Musharraf and the few remarks that Manmohan Singh has made, twice over in Amritsar during the last year, it is not too difficult to figure out what is going on.

The solution under discussion for J&K has five broad elements: no change in territorial disposition in J&K, autonomy/self-governance to both Indian and Pakistani controlled parts of the state, open borders, a cross-border consultative mechanism among the Kashmiris, and finally force reductions coupled to an end to cross-terrorism. What are being negotiated, it is learnt, are the second order issues. To be sure, the devil is always in the detail. And much ground needs to be covered on converting agreed ideas into mutually acceptable definitions.

Sequencing of various steps, too, is always a problem in a complex negotiation. In terms of the diplomatic strategy, the prime minister is confronted with a choice. He could go either for a big-bang approach or settle for incremental progress. The conservative instinct in the system is naturally biased to the latter course. An incremental approach, however, would mean relying on negotiations between the two bureaucracies which, by their very nature, only know how to slow things down. Just consider the difficulties the two establishments are having on such a simple issue as offering reasonable mobility to each other’s diplomats in and around the capital cities. Or the lack of progress in liberalising the visa regime. We don’t even have to mention how the security establishments on the two sides have consistently undercut a potential settlement of the Siachen question.

Given the burden of the past, leaving it to the bureaucracy is the surest way of organising a deadlock even on minor problems. The prime minister must surely see the contrast between the rapid movement in the politically empowered back channel and the bureaucratically driven formal negotiations. The answer, then, necessarily lies in taking the big bang approach that leverages the progress on the big question, J&K, to cut through the hurdles on a whole range of other problems.

In politics, timing is everything. If the statesman misses the big moment, a second chance is hard to come by. Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was surely aware of this. After riding the political roller coaster with Pakistan for many years, Vajpayee’s advisors engineered a big breakthrough in January 2004 at Islamabad. But his party, the BJP, called for early elections and in retrospect denied Vajpayee, who had persevered so hard in reaching out to Islamabad, the final opportunity to transform Indo-Pak relations.

Manmohan Singh, too, appeared to have let go the big moment that came his way during Musharraf’s visit to India in April 2005. After making the conceptual breakthrough on a potential J&K settlement and declaring that the peace process is irreversible, he delayed an early return visit to Pakistan and lost the momentum. As major terror attacks in India resumed from October 2005, it became increasingly difficult to sustain the dialogue.

After the Mumbai blasts in July 2006 derailed the talks, the prime minister once again put them back on the rails at Havana in September. Since then the talks on J&K have acquired traction and there has been no major terrorist attack. This propitious moment is unlikely to last. Indo-Pak relations are notoriously accident prone. The PM has linked his visit to Pakistan to substantial prior progress on the issues at hand. We recommend the PM turn this approach on its head. Manmohan Singh could easily set the dates for an early visit to Pakistan and use it to accelerate the back channel negotiations on J&K and pressurise the two bureaucracies to deliver on the long overdue normalisation of bilateral relations.

One way or another, the Prince of Denmark must make up his mind.