PRESIDENT Asif Ali Zardari presents India with both hope and concern in the matters of bilateral relations.

Since taking political centre stage in Pakistan earlier this year, he has made it clear that he favours a shift in relations with India so that the emphasis is more on improving trade and economic relations rather than the traditional focus on “Kashmir first” before normalising other aspects of the relationship.

New Delhi will be hopeful that Zardari can translate his words into deeds but, equally, there will be an element of concern over dealing with a leader who showed himself to be untrustworthy to his coalition partners. India watched with interest as Zardari turned his back on written agreements with Nawaz Sharif to restore the deposed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary. His justification was that all such agreements were “politics” and constituted “neither the Quran nor the Hadith”.

But given the resurgent anti-India protests in the Kashmir valley, it is clear that even Zardari cannot ignore Kashmir anymore. At his first press conference, he declared that the government would soon announce some “good news” on Kashmir, although officials from both sides seemed unsure this was possible. The two sides are already engaged in efforts to open the Line of Control for trade between the two parts of Kashmir, which New Delhi also believes could be useful in defusing the crisis in the valley.

Worryingly, the four-year-old peace process between India and Pakistan has stopped working once again, this time over India’s anger over the suspected Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) hand in the Kabul attack. After the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries launched the fifth round of the composite dialogue in mid-July, there have been no comebacks from the Indian side on the proposed dates for the other secretary-level talks in the process.

Instead, at the July-end Colombo meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on the sidelines of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), India conveyed to the new government in Islamabad that “it cannot be business as usual”, stopping short of calling off the peace process altogether.

While the Kabul attack has been a major reason for the sudden chill, New Delhi has also been worried at the ceasefire violations since the beginning of this year, which spiked sharply since a democratically elected government took office in Pakistan. It has also expressed concern at the resurfacing of banned militant groups.

Officials on both sides expect that a possible meeting between Zardari and Manmohan Singh on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session in New York at the end of September will help re-launch the peace process.

Nirupama Subramanian