India and Pakistan have agreed to hold a composite dialogue in Islamabad mid-February. It follows Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's talks with Gen Pervez Musharraf at the time of the SAARC summit in Islamabad in the first week of January. It is said the three-day talks at the Joint Secretary and Foreign Secretary levels will decide the agenda of this dialogue.

There is reason to believe that the February talks will take India-Pak relations forward to the goal of peace. Gen Musharraf's statements over the past four weeks have been heartening for New Delhi. He has made that sensational remark about Pakistan setting aside its decades-old insistence on the implementation of the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir.

In his first address to the 16-month old Parliament on January 17, he minced no words while condemning the so-called jehadis. He called upon the people of Pakistan to wage a holy war on the jehadis instead.

His statement was at once welcomed by Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani. The Pakistani dictator also welcomed the recent talks between Advani and the Hurriyat leaders led by Maulana Abbas Ansari. The only nagging worry was that the Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan sounded a little upset when he told BBC Urdu Service that any agreement between the Indian Government and the Hurriyat would not be acceptable to Pakistan.

On the other hand, Indian leaders, too, have stopped making critical statements about Pakistan. There are only sound-bytes intended to have a salutary effect on the peace process and move it towards its logical conclusion. The media, too, appears to have become indulgent towards Pakistan, especially towards Gen Musharraf. After he escaped a very serious attempt on his life on December 25 this has become a marked tendency. Also, after he received the vote of confidence of the Parliament and the four Provincial Assemblies as President on December 29, the deep-seated inhibitions nursed in the Indian intelligentsia about his position were also gone.

So far so good. But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that India and Pakistan continue to have differing, or rather opposite, perceptions about bilateral relations. India's perception is reflected in its offers and actions beginning with Prime Minister Vajpayee's hand of friendship extended to Pakistan on April 18 last year. The essence of India's policy is maximum cooperation and people-to-people interaction at all levels. It is very encouraging to know that his approach has found tremendous response not only in Pakistan but also in the part of Kashmir that is under its (Pakistan's) control.

On the other hand, despite all its protestations for peace, Pakistan still seems to be obsessed with Kashmir as the core issue. When they talk of the composite dialogue their basic fixation with Kashmir has not gone away. It is hoped Musharraf and his government would not allow future negotiations with India to degenerate to what was seen in Agra in July 2001. One may recall that at his summit meeting with Vajpayee, Musharraf had harped on Kashmir as if nothing else mattered. Agra failed because the jehadis back home were weighing heavy on his mind. But 9/11 brought about a drastic change in his outlook. From a protagonist of the jehadis, Musharraf transformed into a one-man bulwark. But, in the Army and the ISI, there are enough jehadi elements who would not want him to make peace with India. And Kashmir is the only one slogan on which they can maintain their dominance in Pakistan. This section of the Pakistani military establishment poses a big challenge to General Musharraf and constitutes a real threat to the peace process.

For, it is because of them that the camps for terrorists are still intact and the known terrorists are moving about freely. The continuance of these camps has been vouchsafed by Indian Army Chief,General N C Vij, who said in a TV interview that there was no evidence that Pakistan has cracked on its terrorists infrastructure as about 80 odd camps still existed there. Even Pakistani commentators have asked Musharraf to be tough with militants who continue to carry on their activities after renaming themselves.

Says eminent journalist Khaled Ahmed in The Friday Times: "Their (militants) leaders too were supposed to be arrested but were not for various reasons. The Lashkar-e-Taiba was banned but its leader, Hafiz Saeed, was allowed to go free and openly bad-mouth the policies of Musharraf, especially the policy on Kashmir. He also boldly condemned the SAARC summit because it pledged free trade with India. Similarly, though the Jaish-e-Muhammad was banned but its leader, Masood Azhar, who was supposed to be under house arrest in Bahawalpur, was not even indoors. When the police went looking for him he was reported to have taken shelter for some days with an adviser of the Punjab government. After the suicide bomber of December 25 was discovered to have been a member of the Jaish, the impunity with which Masood Azhar went around should have been of great concern. The leader of the much-banned Harkatul Mujahideen, Fazlur Rehman Khaleel, was not arrested but asked to remain within his Jamia Khalid bin Walid mosque in Islamabad. The militia most closely aligned with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Harkat al-Jihad al-Islami, was never banned for some reason, but its leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar, was too endangered to stay in Pakistan and was currently housed in Saudi Arabia in the protection of a prince."

But today (unlike earlier) General Musharraf enjoys the support of most Pakistanis and the admiration of all those countries who are impressed with his war on religious militants within the country. In other words, he can afford to assert his leadership for the sake of peace. He has a vision of his country as an economic force. And for this reason he will have to treat peace in the region as the core issue. He must not allow the peace in the region to remain chained to his country's impractical policy on Kashmir.

(The writer is Director, Institute for Media Studies and Information Technology, YMCA, New Delhi and former Editor, UNI)