BBC News | When Bilawal Bhutto Zardari arrives in Goa on Thursday to participate in a conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - a key regional summit - he will be the first Pakistani foreign minister to visit India since 2011.
Hina Rabbani Khar met her Indian counterpart SM Krishna in Delhi 12 years ago, but circumstances were different then. India and Pakistan were experiencing a limited thaw, and trying to boost trade. Paki stan's relationship with the US was in a crisis.
"The diplomatic moment back then was ripe for attempts at rapprochement. It's a different story today," Michael Kugelman of The Wilson Centre, an American think-tank, says.
"For Islamabad skipping the conference would raise the risk of Pakistan being isolated from an organisation that embraces its interests strongly," he added.
Not surprisingly, expectations from Mr Bhutto Zardari's visit to the popular beach destination of Goa are low. It underlines, "most of all that both India and Pakistan attach great significance to the interface with the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO)," says TCA Raghavan, a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan.
No bilateral meetings are expected to take place between Mr Bhutto Zardari and his Indian counterpart S Jaishankar. "Apart from the fact that a Pakistani foreign minister has not visited India in a long time, this visit is pretty much inconsequential in the larger bilateral context," Happymon Jacob of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, says.
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to America who is now at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, echoes a similar sentiment: "The visit, per se, does not represent any thaw in the relationship."
The SCO, founded in 2001 to discuss security and economic matters in Central Asia, is led by China, a key Pakistani ally, and Russia, an important emerging friend of Pakistan. It also includes four members from Central Asia, a region that Islamabad hopes to engage more for trade, connectivity and energy.
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