National Security Adviser J N Dixit will meet his Pakistani counterpart Tariq Aziz before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Musharraf break bread together in New York later this month, top-level sources said. Dixit and Aziz will take forward the dialogue that they established soon after the Congress government came to power, picking up the threads of the conversation between former Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra and Tariq Aziz. Their first meeting took place in Amritsar about a couple of months ago but both have reportedly also met again since, in other cities. But officials declined to either confirm or deny a report in the Pak government-owned newspaper, the Pakistan Observer, that Dixit and Aziz met in the capital over the last couple of days. Just like Mishra and Aziz, the fact that Dixit and Aziz have established such a regular dialogue indicates they have the confidence of their respective principals. Prime Minister Singh has indicated that he would like to ‘‘think out of the box’’ vis-a-vis Pakistan and it is likely that his meeting with Musharraf in New York will add meat to the dialogue process already underway. The two Foreign Ministers, K. Natwar Singh and Khurshid Kasuri, have just concluded a bilateral dialogue, where they promised to take ahead the dialogue on key issues, including Siachen, the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus across the Line of Control and an overland gas pipeline through Pakistan that would begin in Iran and end in India. Dixit and Aziz may well wrap up a number of these issues when they meet soon on the eve of the Manmohan Singh-Musharraf meeting. Singh and Kasuri also committed themselves to talks with their respective Kashmiri groups, so as to take forward their commitment on involving the ‘‘wishes of the Kashmiri people.’’ When the PM visits Kashmir, he is likely to put forward a package on this count. Dixit, meanwhile, is said to have kept in regular touch with both former PM Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra, indicating that the ‘‘forward-looking character’’ of the India-Pakistan relationship is being continued.
