Unlike the July meeting of non-aligned countries at Sharm-el-Sheikh, which witnessed a high-profile meeting between India and Pakistan Prime Ministers on its margins, no such conclave is slated during the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) at Port-of-Spain.

So far, news is that neither Pakistan PM Yousuf Raza Gilani nor President Asif Zardari are coming to Port-of-Spain which obviously rules out any bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. It now appears that even the foreign ministers or the foreign secretaries of the two countries are unlikely to meet separately and their interactions will be limited to the multilateral deliberations.

However, Pakistan will figure prominently when Manmohan Singh meets US President Barack Obama on Tuesday as his first state guest. Coming a few days before the first anniversary of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack and against the fast-paced revelations on David Headley’s links with the carnage.

The PM is likely to draw the US attention to Pakistan’s role in last year’s carnage and ask Obama to lean on Islamabad to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks to justice.

India is also expected to draw attention to the possibility of international aid, provided to Pakistan for developmental and humanitarian purposes, being siphoned off for funding terror activities.

Issues pertaining to the safety of weapons of mass destruction and the overall situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan are also likely to be flagged by New Delhi, which is well aware that Washington is critically dependent on Islamabad in its battle against the Taliban.

Although India is under intense international pressure to resume the stalled composite dialogue with Pakistan, New Delhi is wary of moving in that direction after the angry domestic response to the joint statement the two countries issued at Sharm-el-Sheikh. There appears to be little change in the public mood since then and after the Headley case came to light, the country’s appetite for renewing talks with Islamabad has further diminished.