The statement of compromise came almost 24 hours after the Geneva communique, the delay pointing to the absolute confusion in the Government as it struggled to put together a coherent reaction to the admonitory tone adopted by the permanent-five.

As if chastising two petulant neighbours, the world's most powerful foreign ministers called upon India and Pakistan to immediately adhere to the existing non-proliferation regime as well as pledged themselves to ``actively encourage'' both to find mutually acceptable solutions that ``address the root causes of the tension, including Kashmir...''

The last phrase, however peripheral to the document, has confirmed the worst fears in the Government: TheUS, followed by China and Britain, is raising the bogey of Kashmir as a stick to beat the Indians with because New Delhi dared to go nuclear.

Sources admitted that if the Security Council, which began its meeting in New York today, took its cue from the Geneva meeting and admitted `Kashmir' into a resolution, New Delhi's long and hard 50-year-old struggle to prevent the internationalisation of the dispute would have effectively failed.``India's only option now will be to hunker down and tell the world what it has always said: Kashmir is ours and there's no way we will allow third-party mediation,'' a foreign policy expert said.

In fact, the tepid statement that took the Ministry of External Affairs almost a whole day to put together, reiterates that view. ``Direct bilateral dialogue (with Pakistan) is the only way...We reiterate once again that there is no room for any outside involvement of any nature whatsoever in this process,'' it says.

But the statement also offers major initiatives in keeping withNew Delhi's attempt at reestablishing its credentials as a mature and responsible nuclear weapons power. Apart from offering to observe the strictest controls on exports of nuclear technology, the Government reiterates its promise to observe a voluntary moratorium on testing, participate in negotiations on the fissile material cut-off treaty and discuss a no-first-use agreement on nuclear strikes with Pakistan.

Meanwhile, New Delhi kept up its diplomatic offensive by sending principal secretary Brajesh Mishra to meet British foreign minister Robin Cook in London today. Mishra's Paris visit seems to have borne some fruit, since the references to Kashmir in the Geneva communique are believed to have been significantly watered down by the French and Russian foreign ministers. He will now return home and visit Moscow on a separate visit.

But if today's unmitigated public relations disaster -- the national and foreign press was kept waiting till late in the evening for the official reaction to be cleared --is any indication of the state of affairs in the Government, then the Prime Minister's key aide, Jaswant Singh, has his work cut out for him during his trip to the US next week.

Singh will attend a UN conference on drugs in New York on June 8-9, but really take the opportunity to reason out India's view in the numerous interviews and television chat shows on which he is expected to have star billing (including CNN and the Jim Lehrer chat show).

Besides, he is attending a seminar on disarmament at the University of Pennsylvania, meeting the elite at the Asia Society, the Council of Foreign Relations and the Indo-US chamber of commerce. Appointments with the heads of states of some of the permanent five nations also attending the drugs conference are apparently being worked out.

Pak ready for talks

Pakistan on Friday offered resumption of Secretary-level talks with India suspended last year. A Government statement released in Islamabad said bilateral dialogue needed to be supplemented by abroader multilateral process to promote durable peace in South Asia -- apparently an allusion to the offers from Japan and some other countries to mediate on the Kashmir issue.