NEW DELHI: During their brief telephonic conversation yesterday morning, Mr Nawaz Sharif suggested, “Why don’t you drop in and Mr Narendra Modi replied, “Yes, I am coming.
It was that simple, official sources claimed here today, denying media reports that the Prime Minister’s path-breaking trip to Lahore to congratulate his Pakistani counterpart on the latter’s birthday was pre-planned.
This is the first official visit of any head of government to any country in which how it fructified has became an equally interesting and engaging topic of discussion.
“May be what happened was an easy guess after it was known how it happened, says watchers of India-Pakistan relations.
Amid conjectures about the plan having been made a few days in advance, sources said the idea of Mr Modi stopping over in Lahore while on way his back to New Delhi from Kabul came only yesterday. At 1130 hrs, the Prime Minister, who was in Afghanistan, rang up Mr Sharif to greet him on his 66th birthday.
After thanking Mr Modi for his good wishes, Mr Sharif suddenly proposed, “You are in the region, why not drop in” while on way to New Delhi. To this, Mr Modi replied, “Yes I too want to come,” and thus came the history-making visit, sources said.
When Mr Modi said “I am coming right now,” Mr Sharif said, “Come, I will be there at the airport to receive you.”
The meeting came within a month of the two prime ministers having a pull-aside during the Climate Change Summit in Paris on November 30.
Mr Modi and Mr Sharif had first met in New Delhi, when the latter had come to attend the Indian Prime Minister’s oath-taking ceremony on his invitation on May 26, last year.
The invitation to Mr Sharif along with other SAARC leaders to attend the ceremony was seen as a great diplomatic outreach by India to its neighbourhood.
After that, the meeting of the two Prime Ministers at Ufa and Paris and later the unannounced talks between their NSAs in Bangkok took everyone by surprise.
However, the surprise visit yesterday has sparked an intense debate not only among foreign affairs experts and journalists but also among the people on both sides of the border on how the decision to make a stopover in Lahore to meet Mr Sharif was taken by Mr Modi. (UNI)
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