NEW DELHI: In July last year, Indian Home Secretary G. K. Pillai had all but wrecked the Thimpu mandate of the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers to resume wide-ranging talks between their countries. On Monday, he was gushing that a meeting here with Pakistan’s Interior Secretary Chaudhry Qamar Zaman had been “extremely positive”.The truth of the existing relations between the two countries and the prospects for meaningfully improving them must lie somewhere between Mr Pillai’s relentless need to excoriate and an inexplicable urge for a bear hug with his quarry.

In the absence of an indication of what precisely had been positive in Monday’s talks, a description endorsed by Mr Zaman, it would be useful to see what Mr Pillai said in July that had the opposite effect on bilateral ties. He had accused Pakistan’s ISI of having controlled and coordinated the November 2008 Mumbai attacks that left 166 people dead.

The remarks were received as incendiary by Pakistan although it was not the first time Indian officials directly or indirectly had accused the ISI of subterfuge. Pakistani media and politicians too have taken a similar view on other occasions. Saying what Mr Pillai said was not the issue. It was the timing of his comments that was problematic.

They came as Indian Foreign Minister S. M. Krishna arrived in Islamabad last July to push Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s agenda of peace.

Mr Krishna was unmistakably embarrassed and he told a TV channel upon his return that “in hindsight I think Mr Pillai could have waited till I came back to issue a statement. Perhaps it would have been wiser if that statement had not been made just on the eve of my visit”. The subterfuge is systemic and not confined to any individual.

US diplomatic cables quoted by WikiLeaks did not reveal a great secret recently when they said that Dr Singh was isolated at home in his peace efforts with Pakistan. The home ministries in both countries (in Pakistan’s case the generals too) control many of the levers needed to recast the Thimpu spirit into reality. Mr Pillai and Mr Zaman represent the inherent resistance to a popular desire to sort out the rough edges in the troubled ties.

If they have found something really positive to take home, to push their crucial discussions forward, and if they are not saying things to merely create the right climate — against their natural tendencies — for the prime ministers’ meeting in Mohali on Wednesday, then half the battle for peace is won.

Given their infamous clout as perpetual naysayers in India-Pakistan ties, a joint statement to be released by the home secretaries following a second round of talks on Tuesday may thus hold the key to what lies ahead, in Mohali and beyond.