NEW YORK, May 17: Frank G. Wisner, a former US ambassador to India, has said that the new coalition government led by the Indian Congress Party may slow-but not alter-Indian economic reform and efforts to improve relations with Pakistan.

However, Mr Wisner cautions that the new government, likely to be led by Sonia Gandhi, may not remain in power long. The reason: its thin margin of victory, which may soon lead to a series of new national elections in which Congress would again compete against the Bharyita Janata Party (BJP).

Mr Wisner, who co-chaired a 2004 Task Force on South Asia sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, is also the vice chairman, external affairs, of American International Group (AIG), said that the outgoing Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee felt strongly about the peace process with Pakistan.

"He felt that it was an opening that would happen only once in a lifetime. Before the end of his political life, he wanted to make real progress on the Pakistan front and set aside the quarrel that has plagued his entire generation in India," Mr Wisner said in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Asked whether Mr Vajpayee's Pakistan policy had wide spread support, Mr Wisner said: "Yes, and it had the support of all parties. I think the new government will follow the same policy, with the modest reservations that it has to get its feet on the ground and that it will take a while to prove that the coalition is stable. The direction should remain the same."

He asserted that the new coalition "will want to continue the process with Pakistan, which means that the confidence-building measures [Vajpayee had pursued] in a quietly supportive way, continue creating better grounding for the second, which is substantive dialogue on the political issues, including Kashmir."

Nevertheless, Mr Wisner issued three caveats: The first is that it will take them a while to settle down, put the coalition together, and get traction and get on top of their brief, so there will be delays that one would have not wished to occur, particularly on the reform side.

Second, there is a leftward bias in this coalition. There are 50-some members of the Communist Party, one of the key parties in the coalition. Therefore, some of the more drastic reforms, particularly in the field of privatization and labor reform, will be harder to obtain-unless they surprise us all, and there are reasons they could surprise us. But for openers it will be tough, and they will have to work very hard to make those sorts of reforms happen.

The third is that if my assumption is correct and it will be a hard-to-manage coalition and you may be back in a general election, then you will have a period of uncertainty, which will affect all the accounts: the Pakistan peace account, the reform account, all the governance issues in India.