PATNA, INDIA — Back in Pakistan last week after a gap of two years, I found myself again on the familiar terrain of everyone wanting to know whether moves towards Indian-Pakistan rapprochement are real this time — or whether we are once again chasing chimeras.

To demonstrate national solidarity, I, of course, told them it was for real, but given the inconsistencies, contradictions, and backtracking that have characterized the Vajpayee government’s Pakistan policy over the last five years, frankly I have no faith at all that this lot have what it takes — the grit and determination, the agility and stamina — to move decisively towards a sustainable solution.

Fortunately, given that five key state assembly elections are scheduled for November and a general elections for fairly early next year, talks about talks would have barely got under steam before the current dispensation becomes a lame duck government.

If Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee starts forcing the pace, then the disaster, which overtook his summits with Pakistani counterparts in Lahore in 1999, and Agra in 2001 will overtake this initiative too.

For unless the ground is carefully prepared and laboriously cultivated, a summit should not be held. Indeed, the longer the dialogue is spun out in a constructive manner, the more time there will be for the build up of the atmospherics necessary for the substantial concessions that will have to be made by both sides for a durable comprehensive settlement to be reached. Any other kind of solution would be wholly Pyrrhic and would set us back decades as it unravels, as it inevitably would.

Therefore, what we are seeing is, or ought to be, stage setting. That in itself is vital, for the structuring of the talks will decisively influence the outcome. But it is the government that comes to power in the aftermath of the next Lok Sabha-Indian Parliament-elections which will have the advantage of early days to bring off the “final settlement” envisaged in the India-Pakistan Simla Agreement of 1972. This is the framework for the talks now to be held.

So, while the diplomats labor to set up base camp, what is the condition of the Pakistan we soon must start engaging with?

First, the good news. The Pakistan economy is at long last pulling out of the rut into which it had fallen. So much so that in fiscal 2002-03 they have overtaken India’s rate of gross domestic product growth for the first time in a decade. Their close on five percent GDP growth has resulted in double-digit increase in per-capita income. It reflects an economy on the mend.

Most Indian strategists think a Pakistan in the economic dumps is an easier Pakistan to negotiate with than a Pakistan with a resilient economy. However, I beg to differ. Growth gives confidence. And it is only a self-confident government in Islamabad, which would have the strength to make the compromises, which are a necessary component of finding answers to impossible conundrums.

Also, Pakistan the former pariah is now back as a global player. For the first time ever, it has completed an International Monetary Fund structural adjustment program without faltering midway. In Pakistan, during President Pervez Musharraf’s 1,000 days in power so far, foreign exchange reserves have zoomed from $1 billion at the time of his coup in October 1999 to upwards of $10 billion at present.

Much of this, as in India’s case, comes from remittances and reflects a vote of confidence in Pakistan’s future by the huge Pakistani diaspora. The economic fallout of the renewed Islamabad-Washington axis is less in terms of U.S. aid than in terms of the Non-Resident Pakistani putting his money where his heart is.

As for the international business community, their estimate of the relative worth of the Indian and Pakistan economies is shown up in foreign direct investment in Pakistan, running at $4 billion annually, just about the same as it has been for the far larger Indian economy.

Pakistan as a “failed state” is thus a figment of the yearnings of a certain kind of editorialist and columnist, the kind preferred, unfortunately, by the establishment, which touts the line that Pakistan’s proxy war on India has bled the Pakistani economy white. Rubbish. They are on the up and up and quite capable of sustaining indefinitely their low-cost support to cross-border terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. That is why a diplomatic settlement is all the more necessary.

For the bad news from Pakistan is political rather than economic. The immense gains in the October 2002 elections, which were made by the religious parties whose clerics have since banded together in a coalition called the Muttahida Majis-i-Amal, has taken them to government in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan. This Talibanization of the two provinces closest to Afghanistan — the direct backlash of U.S. ham-handedness in the region — is the most dangerous development in Pakistan since the country came into existence 56 years ago.

For the first time ever, as the incisive Pakistani academic, Prof. Khalid Ahmed put it at the seminar I attended in Islamabad, “Pakistan has always experienced ideological pressure from the well-organized religious parties in the past, but it will now experience the added pressure of representation.”

There is no escaping the significance of this. In the past, the Jamaat-i-Islami rarely took more than two seats, and a handful more went to the clerical parties such as the Jamiat-ul-Islam or the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan. But this time round, the MMA has emerged as the third-largest group in a hung national assembly.

The leader of the MMA was indeed a serious contender for the top post. Any further accretion in the MMA’s strength could well bring a clone of Mullah Omar of the Taliban to the head of the Pakistan government with, doubtless, his own home-grown Osama bin Laden in tow.

This would be disturbing for India and damaging for the United States, but it would also be a tragedy for Pakistan. That is why it is important to forestall further gains by the MMA, as it feeds on a jihadi policy in Kashmir and elsewhere. Therefore it is imperative for Musharraf and his colleagues to find a solution for Kashmir before the Frankenstein’s monster they and the Americans have spawned turns around and devours them.

In Islamabad, I spent nearly three hours with my Cambridge college-mate, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, now propelled to unexpected eminence as foreign minister of Pakistan. I think he is serious and sincere in wanting to find a solution, which will endure. I only hope his Indian counterpart, Yashwant Sinha, has it in him to match the moment.

— Mani Shankar Aiyar is a member of the Indian parliament representing the Congress party. He writes a weekly column for United Press International , for which this was written. This piece is reprinted with permission.