Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, is set to make his first visit to Pakistan after accepting an invitation from his counterpart Nawaz Sharif.
The move, announced on Friday after a bilateral meeting at a regional summit in the Russian city of Ufa, brings a slender hope of a thaw in the relationship of the rival nuclear powers.
A series of recent rows and a fierce cross-border shelling last year had led most analysts to conclude there was little chance of a detente.
However, a joint statement issued on Friday after the meeting said both leaders recognised their “collective responsibility to ensure peace and promote development” and included joint commitments on some of the most contentious issues between the two countries.
India and Pakistan were split in 1947 when they gained independence from Britain and have fought four wars since.
A stop-start peace process has been frozen since November 2008 when a group of Pakistan-based Islamic extremists attacked Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, killing 166 people.
Indian officials had previously refused to confirm Modi’s participation at the next summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, which is being held in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, in 2016.
But the statement said Sharif had reiterated an earlier invitation to Modi, which had been accepted. Many remain sceptical.
“The media always goes overboard when there is any India-Pakistan meeting and obviously if Prime Minister Modi travels to Pakistan next year, you will see the culmination of that. But really, it again goes back to that basic thing [that] if there is any terrorist attack, all this is going to fall down,” said Sameer Patil, a security expert at the Indian Council on Global Relations, a foreign policy thinktank in Mumbai.
Modi, who started his career with a hardline Hindu revivalist organisation and has made no secret of his nationalist vision of India’s role in the region and the world, surprised many when he invited Sharif to his inauguration in May last year.
Senior Indian diplomats said the move was intended to gauge Sharif’s power within Pakistan, where decisions on foreign and security policy are effectively taken by the military. Subsequent events “confirmed our fears”, one Indian diplomat told the Guardian earlier this year.
India has long argued that Pakistan shelters and sponsors Islamic militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is accused of being behind the terrorist assault on Mumbai.
Pakistan says India has failed to give it crucial evidence to prosecute the organisers of that attack and has repeatedly accused Delhi of backing separatist insurgents in its unsettled south-western state of Balochistan.
The joint statement said that both sides had agreed to discuss how to speed up the Mumbai case trial and that their security advisers would talk about issues connected to terrorism. Modi and Sharif met during a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
