Whether Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will merely shake hands with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari or begin a productive conversation with him this week in Russia, New Delhi must reconsider the basic premises of our stalled engagement with Islamabad.

The brief encounter with Zardari, on the sidelines of the multilateral jamboree in Yekaterinburg, must be seen as the first step towards a reconstitution of our strategy towards Pakistan, rather than a return to the framework that obtained before the aggression against Mumbai last November.

If there is no question of returning to status quo ante, as Indian policy makers have said in recent days, a brief recap of the peace process might give us some ideas on how to reframe the engagement with Pakistan.

In retrospect it is easy to differentiate between two phases of the Indo-Pak composite dialogue from the late 1990s until the Mumbai attacks last year. In its early years, the peace process could not deliver much, rocked as it was by a series of crises, including the nuclear tests of May 1998, the Kargil war of 1999 and the military confrontation during 2002 following the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001.

More fundamentally there was no clear political understanding between New Delhi and Islamabad on the mutual give and take. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President Pervez Musharraf finally worked out exactly such an understanding in January 2004.

Under that deal, Pakistan agreed to create a violence free atmosphere, India promised to negotiate on the Kashmir question, and together the two sides would take steps to normalise the bilateral relationship.

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