In Possible Thaw, Pakistani Leader Agrees to Attend Swearing-In Ceremony in India

New Delhi: Ending days of hesitation, Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, on Saturday accepted an Indian invitation to attend the swearing-in of the new prime minister, Narendra Modi, offering a fresh opportunity to revitalize the moribund peace process between the two countries, which have had particularly frosty relations since early 2013.

Modi, a Hindu nationalist who promised in his campaign to make India a more assertive presence in South Asia, broke with historic precedent by inviting top officials from all members of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation to Monday's swearing-in ceremony, which has traditionally not included any foreign leaders.

Leaders of Afghanistan, Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka confirmed their attendance Thursday, and Bangladesh promised to send the speaker of its parliament, because its prime minister will be on a long-planned visit to Japan.

Sharif, however, delayed his answer as he consulted with political and military leaders. A decisive factor was the Indian offer of a bilateral meeting, Pakistani officials and analysts said, because it allowed him to give the visit a more substantive gloss.

"The Pakistanis wanted to go, not just for a coronation but to meet the new leader of India," said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. "But it's also important to tailor our expectations because this is a first meeting between two leaders who have never met. It will be mostly about sizing each other up."

A tentative attempt to rebuild economic and diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan was derailed early in 2013, after fighting along the disputed border in Kashmir. Modi has a reputation as a hard-liner, and during the campaign he sharply criticized the governing Indian National Congress party for maintaining high-level contact with Pakistan despite unresolved disputes about security. At one point, he told a crowd, "the heads of our soldiers are cut, but then their prime minister is fed chicken biryani."

But Pakistani officials expressed hope that Modi would have the political freedom to resume building ties precisely because he, unlike his predecessor, is not vulnerable to attacks from the right - just as in the United States, President Richard M. Nixon, a staunch anti-Communist, was able to reach out to China in the early 1970s.

In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, the reaction to Sharif's decision was mixed. Shamshad Ahmad, a retired diplomat who once headed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Sharif should not have agreed to the visit. "He should have waited, let Modi step into office and lay out his Pakistan policy, and then make decisions," he said.

Still, Sharif's decision enjoys support across the political spectrum, and met with no public resistance from the army.

Sharif's ability to deliver on any peace initiative depends largely on his relationship with the military, which recently came under strain because of the continuing treason trial of Pervez Musharraf, the former military leader.

Modi has a poor reputation among Indian liberals and Muslims, who blame him for not acting quickly enough to stop religious riots that broke out in 2002 in Gujarat, the state he then governed. Last week, some Congress officials accused Modi of hypocrisy, but many of his critics cheered his decision to invite Sharif, and more approving messages came on Saturday after Sharif accepted.

"Very glad to hear Pak PM has accepted invite, shows that he can prevail over forces inimical to good relations with India," Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir, said in a Twitter post Saturday. "I hope this will mark a new beginning in ties between our two countries."

The planned meeting between Modi and Sharif on Tuesday is unlikely to result in any major decisions, and should be viewed as an "icebreaker" between the two leaders, who both run a risk by taking part, said Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research center based in Washington.

Modi's regional foreign policy vision has economics at its core, Tellis said, and there would be a clear economic payoff to normalizing relations with Pakistan. But the new Indian leader "will not have the luxury of doing what is comfortable in his gut," because the relationship is so strongly defined by national security issues, he said. Meanwhile, many within the political establishment may view any attempt at rapprochement with skepticism.

"There is no doubt that under the surface, there is grumbling," Tellis said. "It tells you something about Modi, which is that if he is convinced that this is what he has to do, he really doesn't care what the skeptics say."

Modi, an outsider to New Delhi, has little track record on matters of foreign policy at the national level. He was powerfully influenced by his years as a full-time activist for a Hindu right-wing ideological organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, but as a state leader, he looked overseas pragmatically, with a focus on economic development.

"There is that Nixon-in-China theory, that he is the only one who can make that unilateral gesture which cannot be compromised by anyone, and there is also the idea that his DNA is so anti-Pakistan" that he could not engage with its leaders, said Amitabh Mattoo, the director of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

"I believe he will go for the former," Mattoo said. "Modi, contrary to all the assumptions of his detractors, really wants to go down in history - not necessarily compromising India's positions, but he will reach out."

Modi's invitation to the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, created a stir in India's domestic politics, since powerful regional leaders in the state of Tamil Nadu have long pressured the government in New Delhi not to engage with neighboring Sri Lanka. Late last year, Tamil politicians demanded that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh boycott a meeting of regional leaders in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, to express India's concern over the treatment of Tamils.

On Thursday, Tamil Nadu's chief minister, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, released a statement describing Modi's invitation as "tantamount to rubbing salt into the wounds of an already deeply injured Tamil psyche."

But national elections this month gave Modi's party 282 seats in parliament, meaning he can form a government without the help of Jayaram, and compared with his predecessors, he has far less to lose from alienating her. The invitation to Rajapaksa sends a powerful message to India's regional heavyweights that Modi will make his decisions independently.

"What happened in the last few years is that they completely abandoned responsibility and leadership, and in one shot, he is signaling to all the states that this is going to be a different game," said C. Raja Mohan, a foreign-policy analyst in New Delhi. "He is signaling that he is going to do his own thing, that he wants the freedom to do it his way."