Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir in Islamabad. (AP and AFP)

Islamabad, June 24: India and Pakistan have activated a slow tango that could, as one official graphically said, turn into a “tactile act you can touch and feel” by the time the two foreign ministers meet here mid-July.

Barely months ago in New Delhi, foreign secretaries Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir took diverse podiums after meeting and fought proxy propaganda wars from the backrooms; this afternoon, at the Pakistani foreign office abutting the majestic Margalla hills, they stood together, spoke together, even indulged in happy plagiarism of ideas.

Bashir made his case for a “forward-looking” dialogue process, quoting Rao to say that it was an “essay in mutual comprehension”. Rao looked on indulgently at her counterpart, pleased that her phrase had been purloined. They still stood separated by their moat of differences, but they amplified their common will to resolve them.

“We are seeking to put a new chapter in place,” said Rao, in her consonant echo to Bashir’s opening statement following four hours of formal and informal talks. “And we are focused on the resumption of dialogue and confidence building. Engagement is key.”

Between the two of them, they tried their best to drape the thorny bilateral table in a cascade of affirmative adjectives that verily challenged the thesaurus — comprehensive, constructive, cordial, encouraging, effective, meaningful, positive, sustained, sincere, valuable.

By the end of it, irrespective of the truth of the progress they might have made behind closed doors, the two successfully conveyed that they wanted to dismantle the roadblocks and proceed.

“There are a whole range of issues that await resolution, but the story is the decision to move on and do something about them,” said an official. “And the remarkable thing might be they are almost moving hand in hand.”

What’s unfolding is clearly an orchestral act scripted and set to tune at Thimphu by Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and Yousaf Raza Gilani. The atmospherics set today suggest it will move up tenor to tenor until the two leaders have their next face-to-face opportunity on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September.

“This is inspired by the vision of Thimphu,” foreign secretary Rao readily said. “There is a constituency for peace in both countries, people are the life-blood of any relationship, and this vision of achieving (a breakthrough in our ties) is driven by that.”

For all the surface — and backstage — bonhomie, though, there is nothing to suggest in the slow pirouette of today’s tango that either side has been lured away from prickly reality and lulled into false romance. The “fruitful” discussions were conducted over a meal of hard pebbles that have long refused to exit the Indo-Pak plate: terrorism, Kashmir, border brinkmanship, water sharing, Balochistan and, above all, endemic lack of trust.

The difference, perhaps, was they were not hurling those pebbles at each other. Pakistan heard out India’s pointed concerns on terrorism and its high-profile Pakistani actors, and offered custom explanations.

The Indian side sat through a Pakistani litany on its actions in Balochistan and Afghanistan and pleaded India was doing nothing that should threaten or worry Islamabad.

One may not have convinced the other but nobody was making a hard point of it.

Bashir was remarkably inert to an arrowhead question on why Pakistan was not taking up “Indian encouragement to terrorists in Balochistan” with New Delhi.

The question, asked by a Pakistani journalist, bore the classic mark of a prompt, but Bashir, clearly not interested in scoring pressroom points, met it with a neuter stare and a dreary generalisation on “mutual concern over terrorism”.

Although neither side would spell them out, India and Pakistan have put on board a range of specific confidence-building proposals that will now be referred to respective political leaderships; several of these, sources said, could be firmed up ahead of the July 15 meeting between foreign ministers S.M. Krishna and Shah Mahmood Qureshi.

Sources hinted that information sharing on terrorism and confidence-building measures on cross-border trade and movement of people, especially in relation to Kashmir, are among prioritised issues on the agenda. New Delhi is for fast-tracking cross-border exchanges.

The Pakistani side, the sources said, foregrounded known demands — scrap the armed forces special powers act (AFSPSA), release prisoners, demilitarise.

Some terror-related issues could, in fact, be dovetailed into bilateral talks that home minister P. Chidambaram will have with his Pakistani counterpart Rehman Malik late on Friday and on Saturday on the sidelines of the Saarc interior ministers’ conference.

“Since terror is our core concern and the home ministers are to talk, specific discussions and steps will be for them to discuss,” a source said, indicating, quite firmly, that Chidambaram was unlikely to play true to some media speculation in India that North Block would aim to “combatively confront” Pakistan on the terror issue.

“We are in the process of trying to achieve a firm process of dialogue with Pakistan,” a top Indian official said. “The home minister’s concerns will be modulated by that broad theme.”

India, the sources were at pains to stress, had not “sacrificed” its insistence on the terror issue in order to push ahead with talks but was no longer according it centrality at the expense of dialogue.

“We have told the Pakistanis pointedly that the guilty of the Mumbai attacks must be brought to book and that the Lashkar and the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and Hafiz Saeed in particular, must be restrained from carrying on his anti-India campaign and his exhort to violence. They have told us that they are doing their best to ensure that. Prime Minister Gilani also promised us again at Thimphu that he would not allow Pakistani soil to be used for attacks on India,” the official said.

Blandly that, and no more. No extended carping about Pakistan’s continuing intransigence on terror, no cloak-and-dagger suggestions about the sinister shadow of the Pakistani army and the ISI, no whining over the latest of the thousand cuts in Kashmir.

This is a tango they don’t want tripped without a thorough try.