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.

... contd.