New Delhi, June 5: India is hoping that US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Delhi, expected at the end of July or early August, will help crack the nuclear code.

Over the last few days it has been increasingly clear that the June 8 meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George Bush on the margins of the G-8 summit in Germany will more or less be a dud.

Had foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon and Nicholas Burns, the US negotiator who visited Delhi last week, been able to sort out the reprocessing issue and the testing fallout clauses, the Bush-Singh encounter may have taken on the aura of a political deal.

But with that out of the question, both sides are looking at the second-best option — the Rice visit — and before that a couple of more rounds of technical negotiations.

Menon confirmed that Singh and Bush would only have a casual encounter at the G8 — a “pull aside” as he described it. That is, either leader could pull the other out of the highly formal and minute-by-minute schedules —often the bane of multilateral meetings — and talk.

The composition of the two delegations confirms the point. On the Indian side, foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee will be missing; on the US side, neither Rice nor Burns will be at the G8.