If 2003 saw former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee offering the hand of friendship to Pakistan, 2004 saw the handshake getting firmer. It was a year when the leadership of the two countries endeavoured to 'think out of the box'.

The year did start on a positive note. On January 6, Vajpayee met Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit in Islamabad, and the two agreed to work on resuming the stalled composite dialogue process.

That set in motion a series of meetings between high-level officials of the two countries to discuss various issues -- bus and rail links between Munabao in Rajasthan and Khokrapur in Sindh and a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.

The year also saw the two sides holding talks, after a gap of seven years, on disengagement and redeployment of troops in Siachen. In another major development, they also agreed to restore the full strength at their missions in Islamabad and New Delhi - they had pared the staff following the attack on Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. And as part of nuclear confidence building measures, the two sides decided to set up a foreign secretary-level hotline to reduce nuclear risks.

There were other meetings down the line too. The foreign secretaries of the two countries met five times. Besides, there were also meetings between the water and power, commerce and culture secretaries.

And, of course, the leadership of the two countries were also in touch. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri met External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh in New Delhi in September. Capping the dialogue process were the meetings Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had first with Musharraf on the sidelines of the UNGA session in New York in September and then with his counterpart Shaukat Aziz, when the latter visited New Delhi in November in his capacity as chairman of SAARC.

Supplementing the dialogue process is the ceasefire announced by the two countries last year, which is still holding. That, in itself, is some progress.