NEW DELHI, Oct 18: Their leaders grappling with serious domestic turbulence, foreign ministry officials from India and Pakistan were predictably engaged in a tame dialogue on conventional confidence building measures (CBMs) here on Thursday, one that appeared to be a step back from the progress made already.

A joint statement at the end of the 4th round of expert level dialogue reduced a raft of conventional CBMs that are on the table into a watered down version of their more robust agreements in Islamabad in April last year.

For the record, Pakistan reiterated its known position on the big picture of the CBMs. Led by Aizaz Ahmed Choudhary, director general of the South Asia desk at the foreign ministry, Pakistan sought three major outcomes. It put the focus on conflict resolution, strategic parity and nuclear restraint as a major objective of the CBMs.

But by the time they came to the nitty-gritty of what was agreed in their previous outing the script was lost and simple issues like seeking leniency for people straying across their borders or the Line of Control were overwhelmed by semantics.

In Islamabad last year the two sides had agreed on four small but invaluable CBMs aimed at avoidance of conflict, which were missing from Thursday’s joint statement.

For example, last year they nearly reached an agreement on ‘no development of new posts and defence works’ along the LoC. They had also discussed the finalisation of an agreement on speedy return of inadvertent line crossers.

The new joint statement was silent on these two issues. The statement repeated last year’s formula to describe the talks, which said the discussions were held in a cordial and constructive atmosphere but it failed to say whether they were also fruitful.

According to sources close to the talks, it was not. As mandated by the respective foreign secretaries, the two sides reviewed the implementation of the existing CBMs.

Last year both sides agreed to periodically discuss further CBMs and to review and monitor the implementation of existing conventional CBMs as called for in the Lahore MoU of 1999.

There was nothing to indicate that the fourth round of the conventional CBMs had agreed to persist with these useful contacts.

The obvious setback reflects a political crisis. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said recently that talks between the two countries had slowed down due to the internal problems in Pakistan. But now, after acknowledging that his standoff with leftist coalition partners was not yielding him any ground, Dr Singh too was skating on a thinner ice than his Pakistani counterpart.

That is the perhaps the most glaring difference since officials of the two sides met in Islamabad to discuss conventional CBMs.

The two sides will discuss nuclear CBMs on Friday.