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.

Although the Vajpayee-led political coalition lost the elections in 2004, the new Congress government led by Manmohan Singh signaled its commitment to implement the January framework.

The years 2004-07, when Dr Singh and General Musharraf were on the same page, turned out to be one of the best periods in Indo-Pak relations since Partition. There was forward movement across a broad front of the bilateral relationship.

Above all, the two sides negotiated a framework for the settlement of the Kashmir question through the back channel. By 2008, as Musharraf’s hold on power slipped, cross-border violence began to rise and it was a matter of time before a big terrorist attack would be launched and the peace process undermined.

As we learn from the recent past and look ahead, India must reconsider three core assumptions about the peace process. The first is the belief that we are negotiating with a coherent entity that is capable of making rational choices. Whether we should engage Pakistan or not is a question that makes sense only if treat our western neighbour as a black box.

New Delhi must instead recognise the enormous internal divergence in Pakistan towards India and develop an approach that helps reasonable voices across the border prevail over the incurably hostile ones.

In short, the very purpose of our engagement must be to produce a systemic change in Pakistan. It stands to reason then that we must not suspend the engagement every time India’s adversaries put up an obstacle.

This in turn would call for a deliberate political outreach to the full spectrum of state and society in Pakistan. The capacity to relate to different forces across the border would liberate us from the current either-or framework that leaves the political initiative with those in Pakistan opposed to reconciliation with India.

Second, as we made progress with Musharraf during 2004-07, an unstated assumption in New Delhi was that the army was our best interlocutor. That belief is no longer sustainable.

Once the baton passed from Musharraf to General Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan army has consistently looked for a way out of the peace process. Whatever might have been Musharraf’s individual motivations, it is quite clear that the army is not committed to the principles on which Vajpayee and Dr Singh have negotiated with Pakistan since 2004.

If the Pakistan army is indeed the main obstacle to a lasting reconciliation, India has every reason to talk to all the major civilian leaders in Pakistan, including Zardari, who is the president of the republic as well as the leader of its largest political formation.

Promoting Pakistan’s democratic transformation and facilitating civilian supremacy over the army are by no means easy tasks. Nor can they be achieved by India alone. They can be realised only when India works in tandem with the other major powers that have big stakes in Pakistan.

That in turn takes us to the third premise of the peace process, bilateralism. India’s rejection of third party involvement was borne out of the cold war experience when the western powers tilted towards Pakistan.

A lot of water has flown down the Indus since then. The economic and political balance between India and Pakistan has evolved in favour of New Delhi.

A self-confident New Delhi need not make a fetish of bilateralism. It should be exploring, instead, ways to leverage America’s weight and current interest in the Af-Pak region to produce positive change across the border.

For India there are only two inter-connected objectives in Pakistan. They are to defeat those who organise violent extremism against India and promote a democratic transformation in Pakistan.

All our political energies must be directed towards these goals and not frittered away in an endless debate about secondary questions on either procedure (when and where we might talk to Pakistan) or form (bilateral or trilateral).

The test for our Pakistan strategy must be the same as the one laid down by Deng Xiaoping for China’s economic policy. It must catch the mice.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of

International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore express@expressindia.com