NEW DELHI, Sept 14: President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are expected to hold "substantive discussions" on bilateral issues, including a forward-looking exchange of ideas on the Kashmir dispute , sources close to recent talks between their top security advisers said on Tuesday.

The usually authoritative sources told Dawn that India's National Security Adviser Jyotindra Nath Dixit had met his Pakistani counterpart Tariq Aziz on Friday and Saturday, with much of the focus devoted to the forthcoming meeting between their leaders in New York on Sept 22.

The sources declined to identify the venue of the Dixit-Aziz talks but said it was a third country. In the past Mr Aziz has met Mr Dixit's predecessor, Mr Brajesh Mishra, in Dubai and at London's Savoy Hotel.

There was some speculation that Mr Dixit and Mr Aziz had discussed Singapore as a venue, but it was not clear if that is where they eventually met. They exchanged notes on the talks between the two countries held recently under their structured composite dialogue, including the foreign ministers' joint declaration.

"They picked up the essential issues, discarded the posturing that invariably comes with public pronouncements between the two countries, and discovered they were doing good, earnest business with each other," the sources said.

Focussing on the Singh-Musharraf meeting, both officials pared down the agenda to what they considered were manageable levels. "The idea was to elevate the first time acquaintance meeting between the two leaders to a comfort zone, where it would also acquire a substantive character, involving major issues, including, of course, the Kashmir matter."

Mr Singh had called on President Musharraf as a member of the Congress party team that met him in July 2001 with Sonia Gandhi as the head. So it will not be their first encounter.

Ms Gandhi's proposed visit to Pakistan in December makes it also a requirement that 'the atmosphere of perceptible impatience' in Pakistan built around the 'unimpressive pace' of the composite dialogue in recent days is dealt with in a forthright manner, the sources said.

The two officials have already set the ball rolling. They began their discussions on Kashmir in "all earnestness and very openly, without beating about the bush."

The sources said that both officials were sanguine that talks on bilateral issues, more specifically the Kashmir dispute, were not going to yield any results in a hurry.

Apparently there were exchanges of Urdu couplets to accept that everything would work out in good time, but any haste would run the risk of sullying the air without improving the chances of success much. The officials were said to have accepted the dictum: "Public postures should not be allowed to affect the substantive dialogue."