SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 12: The coincidence of two financial wizards - Prime Minister of Pakistan Shaukat Aziz and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh - at the helm seems to offer India and Pakistan a unique opportunity for developmental progress, says Prof Stanley Wolpert , an eminent scholar on South Asian affairs and the author of a biography of Quaid-i-Azam.

In a comment on the current Pakistan-India peace negotiations, published by Los Angeles-based Pakistan Link, a widely circulated Pakistani American newspaper in North America, Prof Wolpert pointed out that for the first time since the birth of Pakistan and India as independent nations 57 years ago, both are led by prime ministers who never sought nor craved political power, each of whom has broad experience in global finance.

He went on to say that no single fact of Indo-Pakistan history is more encouraging to South Asia's prospects for accelerated economic cooperation and development, or as conducive to optimism for a peaceful resolution of the conflicts that have plagued both nations for more than half a century.

Dr Stanley Wolpert, Professor of History at the University of California in Los Angeles, believes that with these two new prime ministers in power, future interactions between New Delhi and Islamabad should prove to be most fruitful and positively productive.

"The next few peaceful years at least of Indo-Pak relations should be an era of great opportunity," he added. Prof Wolfpert said that when General Musharraf invited Shaukat Aziz to become Pakistan's minister of finance that nation hovered on the brink of bankruptcy.

"No other person could have done what Shaukat Aziz did to restore Pakistan's solvency and global confidence in its capacity to put an end to the stealing and corruption that had been so widespread during Pakistan's previous regimes, under both former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, when billions of that poor nation's resources were so shamelessly plundered by popular leaders, who remorselessly lied to their supporters and followers," he said.