Pakistan to invite PM Modi for SAARC summit, says Pak Foreign Office

Pakistan will invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit, Pakistan Foreign Office Spokesman Mohammad Faisal said on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Imran Khan, who is now the prime minister of Pakistan. Photo: File

NEW DELHI: Pakistan will invite Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit, Pakistan Foreign Office Spokesman Mohammad Faisal said on Tuesday. Addressing a conference in Islamabad Tuesday, Faisal recalled that Prime Minister Imran Khan in his victory speech had said that if India took one step forward, Pakistan would take two. Prime Minister Modi will be invited to Pakistan for the SAARC summit, Faisal was quoted as saying by Dawn newspaper. He said that Prime Minister Khan, in a letter to his Indian counterpart, had expressed Pakistan's openness to resolving all outstanding issues through dialogue with India. "We fought a war with India, relations cannot be fixed quickly," Faisal said. The 2016 SAARC Summit was to be held in Islamabad. But after a deadly terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir in September that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances". The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the Islamabad meet. Maldives and Sri Lanka are the seventh and eighth members of the initiative. SAARC Summits are usually held biennially hosted by a member state in alphabetical order. The member state hosting the summit assumes the Chair of the Association. The last SAARC Summit in 2014 was held in Kathmandu, which was attended by Modi. The decision to extend an invite to Modi for the SAARC comes at a time when the two countries have broken the ice with a decision to build the Kartarpur Corridor for visa-free travel for Sikh pilgrims to visit gurdwaras in Pakistan. While the ground breaking ceremony on the Indian side was done on Monday, Pakistan will complete the formality in Lahore on Wednesday at a function in which Imran Khan will participate. The SAARC Summit has been the casualty of strained ties between India and Pakistan after the Pathankot terror attack in 2016 which New Delhi blamed on elements from Pakistan. Ever since, there have been no high-level contacts between the two sides. A Foreign Ministerial level meeting in September on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York was aborted by India surprisingly a day after announcing it. Faisal also said that the Kartarpur Corridor, which will facilitate the visa-free travel of Indian Sikh pilgrims to Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Pakistan, is expected to be completed within six months. "In this century diplomacy has completely changed," he said, adding policies are now made based on citizens' emotions and wishes. Kartarpur Sahib in Pakistan is located across the river Ravi, about four kilometres from the Dera Baba Nanak shrine in Punjab's Gurdaspur district. It was established by the Sikh Guru in 1522. The first Gurdwara, Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib, was built here, where Guru Nanak Dev is said to have died. (With inputs from agencies)