New Delhi, Sept. 7: India is looking for ways to restart the stalled dialogue with Pakistan and, to that end, may not be averse to allowing a commission comprising Pakistani lawyers and investigators to examine witnesses to the 26/11 Mumbai terror assault.

India also does not want to hand Pakistan an excuse to delay the prosecution of the accused.

It will take a while for Islamabad to send a formal request to New Delhi but sources have indicated that the government sees “no harm” in letting a Pakistani team question Indian witnesses and officials if it “expedites the prosecution” of accused currently facing trial in Pakistan for the attack. Among them are the Lashkar-e-Toiba operations head, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and six others.

Pakistani prosecutors filed a petition in a Rawalpindi anti-terror court today seeking the setting up of a commission to examine 24 key Indian witnesses in the case, including the magistrate who recorded Ajmal Kasab’s confession, the investigating police officer and doctors who conducted autopsies on the terrorists who died in security operations.

The Pakistani establishment has proposed that a representative of lawyers defending the accused should also be made part of the commission. Responding to the petition, terror court judge Malik Mohammed Akram Awan, issued notices to the accused to submit their response to the petition at the next hearing of the case scheduled for September 18.

Perhaps a sign of a fair level of Indo-Pak concert on the issue is the fact that Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik, spoke to home minister P. Chidambaram a few days ago. Malik is believed to have mentioned during the conversation that the prosecution was planning to move the courts for a commission to visit India.

Earlier, the Pakistanis had put in a request that the Mumbai terror case magistrate and investigating officer go to Pakistan to depose before Pakistani investigators. That request was turned down, and India offered, instead, that they could depose by video-conferencing.

Although these are nitty-gritty procedural issues, New Delhi views exchanges on the terror attack case as being linked critically to the wider scheme of normalising bilateral ties, one of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s big ambitions in UPA II. Since a rather bitter and public spat between external affairs minister S.M. Krishna and his counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in mid-July, talks between the neighbours have remained stalled and the government appears keen to find a way to re-start the process. Co-operating with Pakistani requests, such as the one on allowing a commission to visit India, is seen as a way of easing tensions and returning to the dialogue table.

It is not clear yet whether the two foreign ministers will meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly later this month, but sources are not denying the possibility “should the atmospherics be right”. A meeting at the prime ministerial level could, according to the sources, be one of the ways of kickstarting the on-now-off-now dialogue.

It is pertinent here that many among the Prime Minister’s advisers believe that peace and accord with Pakistan also hold the key to a lasting resolution to Kashmir which has been on a bloody boil for nearly three months now. In what revealed a sense of glumness over not being able to tackle the Kashmir crisis, the Prime Minister told top editors yesterday that the government was “groping” for a solution in the strife-torn Valley. Part of the solution to Kashmir, sources emphasise, lies in brokering a peace deal with Pakistan.

India remains miffed at the tardy progress in the case, as well as the Pakistani authorities’ failure to nail Jamat-ud-Dawa chief Mohammed Hafiz Sayeed despite what it calls a “burden of evidence” on his involvement in plotting the Mumbai assault in which 166 people were killed.

The Union home ministry is also upset that Pakistan has bluntly refused to send voice samples of some of the accused so they could be matched with intercepts available with Indian investigators. Pakistan had at one stage promised to provide voice samples but later reneged citing legal issues.

Rehman Malik had last week acknowledged that the trial of the Pakistani suspects was stalled and it was imperative to form the commission that would go to India to record the testimony of the key witnesses like the magistrate and the police officer.