File Photo: Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif at the SAARC Summit in Kathmandu (Reuters)
Will they, won't they? That familiar old question is back as speculation grows over a possible India-Pakistan meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.
The anticipation has been fueled by the confirmed news that the Prime Ministers of both countries - Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif - will be staying at the same hotel - New York's iconic Waldorf Astoria, recently acquired by a Chinese company. That provides enough lee-way for an unscheduled and 'accidental' hotel lobby handshake at the very least.
Sources in the Foreign Ministry say that while no bilateral meeting between the two leaders has been penciled in yet, "nothing is ruled out or ruled in."
Pakistani government officials are just as ambivalent. One laughed out loud at the question and quipped, "Well, if they bump into each other at the hotel, there will of course be Salaam-Dua."
PM Modi reaches New York on Wednesday whereas the Pakistani PM arrives two days later on Friday.
Both men could be in the same room at least on two different occasions - once at the UN Peacekeeping meet chaired by US President Barack Obama on Monday and possibly at the UN Sustainable Development Summit before that on Friday afternoon.
After the Delhi breakdown - when scheduled talks between the National Security Advisers (NSAs) were scrapped in August - Pakistan NSA Sartaj Aziz has told NDTV it is for India to decide whether it wants to initiate a meeting between him and NSA Ajit Doval in New York. The talks were canceled after a red line was drawn by the Modi government on the issue of Pakistanis meeting with Kashmiri separatists of the Hurriyat Conference on the same trip.
Interestingly, while the Indians and Pakistanis have opted to stay at the Waldorf Astoria, President Obama broke from the decades old tradition of staying there amid fears of surveillance and 'bugging' at a hotel now owned by the Chinese. While the Indians at first contemplated a different hotel, the government finally settled on the Waldorf. PM Modi and Nawaz Sharif will be there along with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin.