Instead, vice-president Krishan Kant will lead the Indian delegation to Cairo. Commerce minister Ramakrishna Hegde and Minister of State for External Affairs Vasundhara Raje will also attend pre-summit meetings in their respective areas of expertise.

Incidentally, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has failed to make a visit to India, despite high-level visits by former prime ministers Narasimha Rao and I K Gujral in the last three years to Cairo.

Ministry sources vigorously denied any linkage between Vajpayee's refusal to go to Egypt and Mubarak's presumed inability to find time to come to New Delhi. In fact, they said, "the presence of the Vice-President as the head of the delegation is an indication of the importance India attaches to bilateral relations withEgypt and support for the cause the G-15 represents."

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Mubarak, despite having been presented last year's Jawaharlal Nehru award for peace and understanding, India's highest international honour, has still not visited here.

Mubarak had actually promised to attend the G-15 summit that was to take place in India in 1993, but at the last minute cancelled attendance, in the bargain cutting a sorry figure for the hosts. That summit had to be scrapped altogether because of the then unusually tough requirements for quorum, that of 12 heads of Government and States out of 15.

It was after this disaster that the quorum required was drastically reduced to the easier 5+3 formula (5 heads of government plus 3 vice-heads).

But that wasn't all. When New Delhi hosted the "resumed" G-15 session in 1994, Mubarak again intimated he would be present in the capital as well as for the Retreat -- the traditionally informal session between leaders where most of the real work getstransacted. But other pressing business made him cancel that visit as well.

Next fortnight's 8th summit in Cairo was originally intended to be an ``extraordinary'' session to discuss the South-East Asian crisis. Besides the high-profile Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammed, as many as eight other leaders and 3 vice-heads of government or State will now be in attendance, reconverting the meeting to a "regular" one.

Cairo will also be hosting the turn-of-the-century summit in 2000 AD. Vajpayee's first visit abroad as prime minister will now be to the SAARC summit in Colombo in the first week of July.