Manmohan Singh      J.N. Dixit

NEW DELHI : The trademark sky-blue turban can be seen walking briskly in and out of the corner room that has traditionally been the seat of Indian prime ministers since Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947. Manmohan Singh, the nation’s 13th prime minister, prefers to work out what is called the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) rather than from the official residence of the prime minister at 7, Race Course Road.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee rarely came to the PMO, the highly-secured office secretariat of the prime minister that stands at the end of the imposing twin block of buildings, called South Block and North Block, that the British built atop Raisina Hill.

From there, the seat of power in India, the road slopes down in a gentle gradient to the magnificent Rajpath, the boulevard that leads to the India Gate, now a memorial to the fallen soldiers of World War and one of the capital’s most famous landmarks.

PMO officials are now having to work over the weekends as Singh is keen on having long briefings on security, foreign policy, economic and other matters on such days when he may not be interrupted by too many engagements.

One of the Singh’s closest aides on security and foreign policy is J.N. Dixit, who retired as the country’s foreign secretary in 1994 but was brought back to the establishment 10 years later because of his prodigious intellect, breadth of vision and policy perspective.

Dixit, who had been for the last few years a columnist on international and strategic affairs and writing for, among others, Indo-Asian News Service/News India-Times, joined the Congress Party last year and served as an adviser to party president Sonia Gandhi on foreign and security policy. His appointment as National Security Adviser by Manmohan Singh did not at all, therefore, come as a surprise.

Dixit is the first person the prime minister meets every morning for his security briefing and is bound to play a very important role in the evolution of the country’s complex ties with Pakistan and China.

With the nuclear-restraint talks with Pakistan over the weekend, the first since the two countries became nuclear powers in May 1998, Dixit set the diplomatic ball rolling with an unpublicized meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Tariq Aziz over lunch in Amritsar

In the June 8 meeting ––both sides have denied such a meeting ever took place –– Dixit met Aziz, known to be a close confidante of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, for the first time at the latter’s request at a hotel in Amritsar, privileged sources told IANS.

Aziz came to Amritsar by road through the Wagah border as he did not wish to fly.

The fact that the meeting got leaked in the Pakistani media is attributed to “elements in Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence” who got wind of Aziz’s crossing the border and are against a rapprochement in India-Pakistan relations, the sources said.

The “conversation” –– the sources insist it was not so much a structured meeting as a getting-to-know-each-other interaction –– between Dixit and Aziz centered on the options available to both sides on Kashmir as well as confidence-building proposals to forestall a nuclear crisis in the subcontinent.

The “conversation” took place as both sides are keen to keep the momentum going on the peace process that culminated in the meeting between Vajpayee and Musharraf in Islamabad at the beginning of this year.

The U.S. has been nudging the two sides on the need to keep the dialogue going so that some progress is made towards the ultimate resolution of the two main “flashpoint” issues that have been a source of concern for the international community for their global implications –– the nuclear rivalry and the Kashmir dispute.

Aziz and his former Indian counterpart Brajesh Mishra played a key back-channel role, through a series of secret meetings and conversations, in facilitating the Vajpayee-Musharraf summit on Jan. 5 and their joint statement the next day, events that took everyone by surprise as both sides had till then assiduously disavowed the possibility of a one-on-one meeting between the two South Asian leaders on the sidelines of the SAARC summit that Vajpayee had gone to attend.