It would be a South Asian photographer's dream if their paths crossed, but General Ved Prakash Malik and Sahibzada Yakub Khan are here with different agendas and take different routes.

Given the tepid or minimal defence ties between New Delhi and Washington, no one can quite remember when an Indian Army chief last visited the United States (General Roy Chowdhury made a low-key visit here sometime back but after his retirement). The sub-continent's nuclearisation and Kargil appears to have changed everything with Washington wanting to maintain a high degree of contact with New Delhi to add to its leverage with the Pakistani armed forces.

It turns out that the initiative for GenMalik's Washington visit came from the US itself. Originally, the Army Chief was to have gone only to Hawaii to attend a meeting of regional commanders hosted by the US Pacific Command.That proposal was expanded to include a Washington stopover during which the General will meet top Pentagon and State Department officials, including Undersecretary of Defence Walter Slocombe and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering.

The US Joint Chief of Staffs Gen Shelton will be his host in Washington. The Indian chief, who is already in New York, will also visit West Point.

The Army chief's visit comes at a time when many US military sanctions against India remain in place following the Shakti tests.``But since they proposed the visit, we were happy to accept,'' an Indian official acknowledged, hoping that the exchange would lead to the resumption of the Defence Policy Group (DPG) meetings between the two sides which presaged the emerging cooperation in the mid-90s.

The DPG has been moribund for a while now andthe military relationship had returned to the normal, glacial, distrustful state following a spate of misunderstandings over the last couple of years. At one point things had got so bad that a former Indian Defence Secretary cancelled a Washington visit in a huff following a protocol flub he was pencilled to meet an American bureaucrat lower down in the pecking order. But the sketchy defence ties between the two countries go back even further. The uncomfortable and uneven military relationship is best illustrated by the comment of a senior military officer who served in Washington: When he went to the Pentagon for meetings (he said), everything was stiff, starchy, and proper.

When his Pakistani counterpart went, he would toss his cap on the table, loosen his collar buttons and talk to Barry or Jim or Mike about their days in Fort Leavenworth or West Point. ``Their comfort level is far greater than ours,'' the Indian officer who served here for three years before returning to New Delhi recentlysaid.

Indeed, the institutional relationship between the Pentagon (and US intelligence circles) and the Pakistani military is so strong that it had overridden all other concerns, including the reservations of the state department on the overthrow of a civilian government. Analysts have noted that there is almost a sense of relief among the defence brass of the US that they can get back to doing business with the generals in Pakistan. In a Congressional hearing last week, a former CIA operative in Pakistan suggested openly that the Clinton administration deal with the Musharraf regime to regain its leverage with the Pakistani army. No such devious motive infects the military relationship between Washington and New Delhi.

But officials from both sides say the defence relationship between the two countries has improved vastly from the Cold War days when there was zero contact. In fact, one little known aspect of the warming ties is that throughout the time Pakistan suffered from military sanctions becausethe Pressler Amendment, India was the beneficiary of military-to-military contacts through the Washington International Military Education and Training (IMET) programme.

Typically, that programme was interrupted last year following India's nuclear tests there were also snide remarks in the Raksha Mantralaya about Washington trying to meddle with the selection of officers and the low financial allocation to India (New Delhi gets about the same amount as Pakistan and Bangladesh). But it has now been resumed with an Indian naval officer currently on exchange to the US.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's polished statesman-diplomat Sahibzada Yakub Khan continued his parleys with top American officials as he sought US patronage and support for the military junta in Islamabad. Among the key and immediate issues between the two sides: a $ 268 million tranche of IMF loan that is desperately needed to stop the Pakistani economy from imploding.

Washington can turn on the screws by opposing the loan but an administrationofficial said no decision had been taken on the matter because the IMF board meeting had not yet been scheduled.

Khan is slated to meet Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott today. Talbott himself will leave for London early next week for his tenth round of talks with India's External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh.