Until the force of circumstance takes the present tense by a firm hand and places you in the lens of the television camera. That's when Sartaj Aziz and his ilk realise they have to deal with history. It almost never helps when the key interlocutors in the argument are old antagonists, their simmering disputes fattened on distrust and prejudice. And when one of the parties, in this case Pakistan -- represented by none other than its Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz -- attempts to even alter the geography of the dispute, then all hell begins to break loose.

At the time of going to press, India, theaggrieved party, has still not confirmed dates for letting Aziz into New Delhi for talks on the Kargil crisis. Furious at the fact that Islamabad continues to ``add insult to injury'' by now doubting the sanctity of the Line of Control (LoC) -- Aziz has made a statement to the effect in Islamabad that the LoC is itself disputed -- the Government here has considerably upped the ante by declaring unilaterally that there can be only one parameter for the talks: Pakistan must vacate the armed aggression that it has sponsored along as much as 100 km of the 140 km-odd line that has divided them since 1972.

For the moment, then, Aziz is clearly in the firing line. It wasn't always this way, though. In fact, for most of his 70 resplendent years, the gentleman extraordinaire has distinguished himself by staying out of the limelight. Through the street-fighting years in Pakistan, from 1971 onwards -- as the original Bhutto carved out a larger-than-life place for himself in his country, was unceremoniously hanged in1979, and through the military dictatorships and coups that followed -- till 1984, Aziz even lived outside Pakistan.

He was in Rome for all those years, first with the FAO, then the World Food Council and then the IFAD. He returned to the mother country only in 1984 and was promptly elected Senator from his home state, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). People from his hometown candidly say that if he were to contest in direct polls, he would surely lose his deposit.

A civil servant all his life (he also studied development planning and management at Harvard), he now joined politics in earnest. Initially in the first Nawaz Sharif government as minister of state for food and agriculture, he was then a federal minister of finance in Sharif's second government -- a post he held when Pakistan went nuclear in late May last year.

It was during this time that he was unkindly dubbed `Surcharge Aziz', probably because he was directly responsible for the many levies and as the people were asked to tightentheir belts and eat the equivalent of grass. Foreign accounts were quickly frozen. It didn't help, really. The economy, deeply in the red, slowly went into a tailspin from which it still hasn't recovered.

It also didn't help, even as the international community was criticising Sharif for the nuclear tests, that in August 1998, then foreign minister Gohar Ayub Khan was taking on the Americans for firing missiles into neighbouring Afghanistan to bust the operations of terrorist Osama bin Laden. Sharif, desperate to regain control over his government, dumped Gohar and sought to replace him with someone who would be his master's voice. In Islamabad, people say Sharif wanted his own man to run the Finance Ministry and got Ishaq Dhar. The new man in the foreign office was Sartaj Aziz. The two Pathans in Islamabad, Gohar Ayub Khan and Sartaj Aziz, couldn't be more different. Gohar is true to type -- large, expansive gestures, colourful language and prone to making statements that rub people the wrong way. Aziz, onthe other hand, prefers to keep a low profile. In Delhi, some liken him to Manmohan Singh. Aziz is also said to be a man of personal integrity, quiet rather than boisterous, and probably couldn't win an election on his own steam.

These are precisely the qualities which make him a good interlocutor for Delhi. Sources here point out that Mushahid Hussain, Sharif's close confidant and information minister, is not being sent to Delhi as the PM's envoy to resolve this crisis, unlike the time in late 1997 when he came here to revive the foreign secretary-level dialogue.

``Mushahid is too high-profile, too close to the powers that be,'' they say. ``Sartaj Aziz, on the other hand, is functionally correct and speaks from a given brief, which is the message of Sharif and the establishment.''

Aziz, then, is not expected to step out of line during the talks. Which is why his statements in Islamabad questioning the veracity of the Line of Control as well as suggesting that some sort of formula with New Delhi was inthe offing -- perhaps letting UN monitors supervise the withdrawal from the LoC -- got New Delhi's hackles up. They believe that Aziz was only saying what he had been asked to say.

Under the circumstances, Pakistan's completely audacious gambit to internationalise the Kashmir situation through this latest act of aggression is probably the last chapter in bilateral hostility before the end of the century. With the number of Indian dead and injured mounting every day, the Government has finally come around to saying that it will not rest until the ``aggressor is thrown out of Indian soil''.

It is this diplomatic landmine that Aziz will have to sidestep in Delhi. The days when one could have a long evening chat with one's neighbour over some pleasant stimulants may, at least for the moment, be a thing of the past.