In a major peace offering, the Government has asked President K R Narayanan to break convention and receive Chinese Ambassador-designate Zhou Gang's credentials at a select function on Monday along with the Ambassador-designate of Belarus.

This is a major departure from the established practice of bunching at least three or four Ambassadors together for the ceremony which kicks off an Ambassador's diplomatic tenure.

Zhou has been waiting for the call from Rashtrapati Bhavan for five weeks along with his counterpart from Belarus who arrived in Delhi before him. The ceremony was kept on hold in anticipation of a third arrival.

By going ahead with the function without the mandatory numbers, the Government hopes to send a conciliatory signal to Beijing.

As a run-up to this, Foreign Secretary K Raghunath brokeanother convention last Friday by calling in Zhou for detailed discussions to set the record straight on the Government's desire to restore normalcy with Beijing. Diplomatic protocol demands that an Ambassador meet the Foreign Secretary only after he has presented his credentials.

In addition, India's Ambassador to China, Vijay Nambiar, who was here for consultations last week, returned to Beijing with instructions to meet senior Chinese Foreign Office officials with the same message given to Zhou in New Delhi by Raghunath.

The Vajpayee Government now seems to be regretting its hasty and ill-advised gambit with the China card to justify its decision to go in for nuclear tests.

For a brief while after the tests, the initiative on the China front was usurped by the PMO which drafted Vajpayee's controversial first letter to US President Clinton, ignoring MEA's reservations on using China as a shield. According to senior government sources, the Prime Minister's Principal Secretary, Brajesh Mishra, had amajor say in the formulation of the new policy on China which envisaged taking an aggressive line with Beijing.

The new formulation was based on two simplistic premises: one, that the US would back India as a countervailing force to China because of the basic contradictions in Sino-US relations; two, that India's nuclear weapon capability would bring about a new equation in Sino-Indian ties in which New Delhi would no longer be the underdog.

The view prevailing in the PMO was totally at variance with the policy followed by MEA which has been trying to normalise ties with China in an attempt to break the Sino-Pakistan-US nexus of the Cold War era.

It was a classic example of bypassing the system on a major foreign policy venture, thereby overturning years of hard diplomatic work by MEA to thaw out a relationship which remained frozen in suspicion and mistrust for three decades.It was only when the PMO began consulting the system on handling the fallout of the nuclear tests that its folly on the Chinesefront began to dawn on the Government.

There is a growing realisation that its earlier assumptions were naive to say the least and that reopening hostilities with China was not in India's interests as it would only upset the tenuous balance established in the region.Interestingly, Vajpayee's subsequent letters to international heads of state were drafted by MEA, not the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). These letters were conciliatory in tone and did not point an accusing finger at any country unlike the first set of despatches. They simply attempted to explain India's position in conventional diplomatic language.

The Indian Government's repair work with China is an indication that foreign policy initiatives may be on their way back to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and its professional diplomats. This will hopefully ensure that the consensus of the past five decades remains intact.