``The bottomline is to discuss things in a substantive and comprehensive manner. That's the short productive approach. The point is, what are both countries trying to achieve. Life is short, you have to be realistic about you're trying to do. But it takes two to tango,'' senior officials in the Ministry of External Affairs said.

The imperceptible hardening of New Delhi's approach is evident on the eve of the encounter between the two prime ministers, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif in Colombo on the evening of July 29, the first day of the SAARC summit.

The meeting, their first after both nations went nuclear in May, is expected to be the focus of worldwide attention, especially asPakistan is heavily trying to get third parties to intervene in the Kashmir dispute, so much so that it has now even linked a signature to the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty on progress in resolving this issue.

New Delhi doesn't realistically hope to achieve much at the Colombo meeting, but officials said they would give the encounter their best shot. Nevertheless, the government cannot escape from the assessment that the US is abstaining on IMF loans to Pakistan because it doesn't want Islamabad's economy from going under.

Secondly, New Delhi also believes that Washington's keenness to quickly run through the hurdles of the Indo-US dialogue -- thereby getting India to sign the CTBT as soon as possible -- is to a large extent linked to waiving economic sanctions imposed on both India and Pakistan, but especially Pakistan.

Still, the government hopes that the world will see it as a flexible and mature state, not wanting to introduce further tension in the sub-continent. ``The first premise in our approachwith Pakistan is that we want a stable and prosperous Pakistan, a situation in which the two countries can work together on the basis of their many commonalities and affinities,'' the officials said.

The only way that could be done would be discuss all issues involved in a composite manner. ``These issues are inter-connected, they cannot be fragmented,'' they added, thereby rejecting Islamabad's proposals of breaking up the agreed agenda between the two countries into first, a discussion of Kashmir and peace and security, including confidence-building measures, and 6 other issues including Tulbul barrage, Sir Creek, people-to-people interaction and trade & investment.

But the senior officials also emphasised that India had clearly told the Pakistanis that the ``process of dialogue was being vitiated by the fact that Islamabad was carrying on vicious and virulent propaganda for years together,'' thereby violating all bilateral agreements on the conduct of relations, including the Shimla agreement.``Normal state relations can only be built when such things are stopped,'' the officials added. A second prerequisite to the conduct of healthy bilateral dialogue would be the end of cross-border terrorism ``which has to be rectified,'' they said.

The officials rejected all attempts by either Pakistan or the international community to attempt to intervene in the Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir, saying ``there's no question of deviating from bilateralism. We believe we're right. We will insist on what we're saying.'' Meanwhile, the officials reiterated, India will also reiterate the offer of a no-first-use nuclear strike with Pakistan.