Nawaz Sharif looks for dialogue restart

New Delhi: Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said the “moment in history must be grasped, and turned to both our nations’ advantage”.

He said he felt the same sense of excitement as he did when he had broken the ice with former Prime Ministers Inder K. Gujral and Atal Behari Vajpayee, and then qualified that by saying he expected Tuesday’s meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to go even further, and lead to a resumption of a substantive dialogue between the two countries that would bring peace to the region.

“This is the same BJP (of) Prime Minister Vajpayee, for whom I have the greatest of respect. I intend taking up the threads from where Vajpayee and I left off in 1999,” Mr Sharif was earlier quoted as saying in a TV interview.

On the deferred MFN status that had been held back until a new government was sworn in, the Pakistan PM said his government had taken a “conscious decision” to do so. “Our focus must be to give our peoples a better tomorrow,” Mr Sharif added.

In the TV interview, he said this was a chance to reach out to each other while noting that no two nations had ever possessed so much cultural and traditional similarities as India and Pakistan. “Why not turn the similarities into our strength. I very much look forward to meeting Mr Modi. We should remove fears, mistrust and misgivings about each other,” he added.