ISLAMABAD, Jan 20: Indian High Commissioner Shiv Shankar Menon met Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri at the Foreign Office here on Tuesday to discuss bilateral talks scheduled next month.

The nearly 30-minute one-to-one meeting held on Mr Kasuri's initiative focused on the level of talks, sources said. The meeting was held a day after Pakistan offered to host technical-level talks in March on proposed bus services between Khokhrapar and Munabao, and Muzaffarabad and Srinagar.

Foreign Minister Kasuri and Mr Menon discussed commencement of the composite dialogue process in accordance with the decision taken by President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee," a Foreign Office spokesman told Dawn. They also reviewed developments in relations between the two countries, the spokesman said.

The Kasuri-Menon meeting signalled that communication through diplomatic channels had been stepped up over the past week. Both sides have decided that modalities for commencement of the dialogue would be worked out through diplomatic channels.

While progress on confidence building measures continues, there is no public pronouncement on the key question of the level of bilateral dialogue. A statement by Mr Kasuri last week conveyed Pakistan's preference for dialogue at the foreign secretary level. He may have conveyed this to his Indian counterpart Yashwant Sinha when the latter telephoned him on Saturday.

Mr Kasuri would likely have repeated the same in his meeting with the Indian high commissioner. Evidently Pakistan's foreign policy-making institutions consider the level of contact as a major test of India's sincerity to resume the dialogue meaningfully.

Observers believe that while both India and Pakistan have earned goodwill at the international level following the Jan 6 joint statement, it is India which has concretely benefited at home and abroad as a result of this. According to an analyst, soon after the signing of the statement between President Gen Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee, United States President George Bush formally bestowed the status of a strategic ally on India.

Prime Minister Vajpayee is already reaping the fruits through additional admiration of the Muslims in this election period as a peacemaker with Pakistan, said the analyst.