Singh, who arrived here on Saturday on a five-day visit along with a six-member delegation, is to attend the meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which the 10 members of the Association for South-East Asian Nations hold annually with their 11 "full dialogue" partners. India won admittance to this forum three years ago, much to the chagrin of Pakistan, and has since utilised its meetings to hold useful discussions on regional security issues.

These diplomatic discourses will in all probability be the last that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Government will conduct before the general election. By far the most significant meeting that Singh will have here is the one tomorrow with US secretary of state MadeleineAlbright. The meeting is being held against the backdrop of what is being called a "Kargil spring" in Indo-US relations where, after a long time, Washington seemed to show considerable understanding of New Delhi's security concerns which was reflected in the way the US led the powerful G-8 nations to virtually throw their weight behind India in the Kargil conflict with Pakistan.

This will be the first opportunity for India to give its perspective on the Kargil conflict at such a high level. The US wants an early resumption of the dialogue with Pakistan but Singh will make it clear to Albright that a return to the Lahore process would be possible only after Pakistan "repairs the damage that it has done to trust" by launching the Kargil intrusions, senior officials said.

Singh has stated that there ought to be a "re-examination" of India's ties with Pakistan in the wake of what happened at Kargil. Much of this current empathy for India is being attributed now to the year-long Indo-US security dialogue thatSingh has been holding with deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott in the wake of New Delhi's nuclear tests of May 1998.

Attitude towards India was not coloured by cold war perspectives but reflected a new post-cold war realism. Their dialogue was free from any moralising by New Delhi or hectoring from Washington and was marked by what Indian officials call a "mature approach by both sides towards understanding each other's security concerns and national interests". With proliferation and extremism being the twin post-cold war threat perceptions, Indian diplomacy sought to highlight the danger that Pakistan appeared to have courted. As a result Pakistani actions in Kargil were seen by the rest of the world as pandering to a volatile mix of extremism and fundamentalism with unpredictable consequences for the entire region.

"Pakistan came out of Kargil as somewhat of an adventurist nation as compared to the restraint and responsibility demonstrated by India in the face of extreme provocation," said aWestern diplomat here. "Kargil promoted the image of Pakistan as a state not in control, as a state that demonstrates a dangerous degree of recklessness in its dealings with others and a state in which extremist elements are able to hijack the national agenda," the diplomat, who is a participant in the ARF meetings, said. As a result, Indian officials say, Pakistan found "no buyer" this time for the "myth" that the intruders into India were of clarity in the line of control (LoC).

When Riaz Khokhar, Pakistan's ambassador to the US, sought to make this point to Karl Inderfurth, assistant secretary of state for South Asia, he was taken aback at being presented with 40 pages of Shimla Agreement documents, map by map, grid by grid, that testified to the the LoC's ratification and acceptance by both countries at the time. On the fringes of the ARF, Singh will be meeting also with Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura,Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and the Asean leaders.

Officials, however, agree that a feeling of self-satisfaction at the world showing understanding for India's position must be tempered by the realisation that such backing could be short- lived unless New Delhi moves quickly on signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and resuming the dialogue with Islamabad.

India has so far resisted signing the treaty, which more than a hundred countries have signed, calling it discriminatory. But with the Kargil conflict raising anew the spectre of a nuclear war in the subcontinent, there are expected to be renewed questions put to the Indians here on how soon the next government could move towards its acceptance.