Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Pakistan for a surprise visit Friday — a significant sign the icy relationship between the two neighbors is thawing.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif greeted him at an airport in Lahore during his short layover in the city while en route to New Delhi from Afghanistan. Sharif was accompanied by his brother Shahbaz, Punjab province’s chief minister.
Modi visited the official residence of the Sharif family in the Punjab town of Raiwind for impromptu talks expected to last two hours.
It’s the first time an Indian prime minister has visited Pakistan in almost 12 years.
The last Indian prime minister to visit Pakistan was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, when he attended a South Asian summit in 2004 and held talks with then-President Pervez Musharraf.
Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, did not visit Pakistan during his two terms that ended in 2014.
The visit is a hopeful sign after the off-and-on talks between India and Pakistan, which suffered some setbacks in 2015.
In August, talks were canceled over an agenda conflict, only to have the national security advisers of both countries meet recently for surprise dialogue in Bangkok, Thailand.
This month, Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj also visited the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, signaling a further ease in bilateral ties.
“Prime Minister Modi has once again proved his critics, who call him a Hindu hardliner, wrong by his unconventional style and by leading India’s foreign policy from the front,” said K.G. Suresh, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based Vivekananda International Foundation, which was founded by Ajit Doval, India’s national security adviser. “The ice has been broken.”
Suresh added, “This short visit has raised hopes high for peace and prosperity in South Asia.”
Sharif, who attended Modi’s inauguration as prime minister last year, invited his Indian counterpart to Pakistan when they met in Russia in July.
In a joint statement, they expressed Modi’s commitment to attend a South Asian summit next year.
The nuclear rivals have sparred over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
Relations between India and Pakistan have been strained over a series of cross-border firing incidents that both countries blamed on each other.
India has also alleged that Pakistani militants were behind terror raids on its soil this year, which Islamabad denied.
Both countries have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir since independence from Britain in 1947, when the Asian subcontinent was divided into Islamic Pakistan and secular and Hindu-majority India.