Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, will visit India on March 9. Although it is not an official visit, it is significant, given that it comes just a week before his scheduled stepping down from the office on March 16 – when the term of the National Assembly expires, and a caretaker Prime Minister will take charge to oversee the general elections.
During this day-long personal visit to the country – which, incidentally, is also his first visit to India as the Prime Minister – he will pray at the shrine of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer Sharif, 400 kilometres west of New Delhi. Following the visit to the shrine, Indian External Affairs Minister, Salman Khurshid, will host a lunch for Prime Minister Ashraf, in Jaipur; India has stated that there wont be any ‘substantive’ talks.
Regardless of the type, this is the first high-level visit by any leader on either side of the border since the steadily-thawing New Delhi-Islamabad relationship hit a rough patch in January. Following the brutal killings of Indian soldiers by the Pakistani army in January, there have been negligible exchanges between the two neighbours. While Pakistani commerce minister Makhdoom Fahim called off a visit to India, New Delhi, too, postponed talks between the water resources ministries in January. Instead, it proposed new dates in March for the talks.
Ashraf will be the most senior Pakistani to visit India since last April, when President Asif Ali Zardari embarked on a similar visit, following which he met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.