Friends?

After lunching with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Zardari is scheduled to visit the revered Ajmer Sharif shrine in the western state of Rajasthan, just as his predecessor Pervez Musharraf did in April 2005.

Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna said on Friday that he was not sure how deep the discussion between Singh and Zardari would be. "After all, it's a private visit. He's coming on a religious mission. I don't know whether they will have time to go into details."

Although the visit has been hailed as "private," there were reports in the Pakistani media on Friday that the president would be accompanied by a 40-member delegation, including Interior Minister Rehman Malik.

Symbolic visit

South Asiaexpert Christian Wagner from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs said that the visit was more "symbolic" than anything else, considering the president - nicknamed "Mr 10 percent" - has little political power.

However, he said that the fact that "a Pakistani president can meet his Indian colleague shows that ties have improved considerably over the past few years."

The Mumbai attacks of November 2008, in which at least 166 people were killed, plunged relations between the two archrivals to a new low, with India accusing Pakistan of backing the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba that it blames for the attacks and demanding a crackdown on terror cells in Pakistan.

"Pakistan's military tradition of supporting militant Islamist groups and using them against India goes back decades," said Wagner.

This week the US issued a 10-million-dollar bounty for Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, further fuelling anti-US sentiment in Pakistan. On Friday, hundreds of Islamist activists took to the streets of Pakistan to condemn the bounty, calling for holy war and torching a US flag. Speakers at the rally also demanded President Zardari cancel his visit to India.

Army calls the shots

The Indian political scientist Savita Pande from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi was not very hopeful about Zardari's visit to India for future bilateral relations. She too pointed out that he had little to say. "The crucial issues of Pakistan foreign policy will never come to civilian hands. They are in the hands of the army."

"In fact, after the attack on Osama bin Laden, the army was totally discredited," she pointed out. "Since then, the army has tried to paint a picture of putting the civilians in front but the actual policies are conducted by the army and they call the shots."

Wagner was more optimistic and said the fact that Pakistan had recently decided to grant the trade status of Most Favored Nation to India, thus approving the "normalization" of Indo-Pakistani trade relations, showed that moderate forces were being encouraged.

He added that Indian trade delegations already regularly visited Pakistan and there had been a series of measures to contribute to the thaw in the icy relations that set in after the Mumbai attacks.

Status quo over Kashmir

Wagner doubted whether this change of course would have been taken without the army's approval. Parts of the military were aware that growth and economic development are necessary for Pakistan's stability, he said.

"For a long time, Pakistan set the condition that the Kashmir conflict had to be solved before trade was established with India. This is no longer the case," he said.

He explained that the two sides had satisfied themselves for the time being with the status quo in Kashmir - an issue that almost led to a fourth war between the two in 1999 - and had put an emphasis on trade.

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, made a strong pitch to the Indian premier and the Pakistani president this week to re-examine Confidence Building Measures to boost trade and travel across the Line of Control, the de facto border.

Author: Hans Spross / Anne Thomas (AFP, AP)
Editor: Sarah Berning