India hopes for Pakistan reset after Sharif election

India hopes that Pakistan's new prime minister will herald a diplomatic thaw between the two nuclear-armed foes after years of tensions, analysts say.

The pragmatic and business-friendly Shehbaz Sharif faces daunting challenges as leader — among them relations with a neighbour his country has fought three wars against in the past 75 years.

But he hails from an elite political family seen in India as conciliatory towards New Delhi and willing to settle disputes with dialogue instead of denunciation — unlike his immediate predecessor.

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"He is not someone who will go to the extreme of antagonising India," Ajay Darshan Behera, a professor of international studies at New Delhi's Jamia Milia Islamia university, told AFP.

Unusually for a senior Pakistani politician, Sharif has actually visited India, in 2013 as chief minister for Punjab — a state that was split between them in the bloody 1947 partition of the sub-continent.

Sharif visited his family's ancestral village on the Indian side of the frontier and met with then-prime minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi, along with other officials.

And for his part, his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi has attended a Sharif family wedding.

Imran Khan (left) and Narendra Modi

The Hindu nationalist leader made a surprise trip to Pakistan in 2015, a year after taking office, when he was hosted by Sharif's elder brother Nawaz, himself prime minister at the time.

Both siblings have usually had "cordial relationships" with Indian leaders, said Imtiaz Gul of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad.

"This is a good entry point basically for India to resume dialogue," he added.

Modi's trip was followed by several rounds of trust-building talks aimed at repairing relations that had sunk to a low ebb after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, which India accused Pakistan of sponsoring.

But that came to an abrupt halt the following year with renewed conflict in Kashmir, a territory hotly disputed by both countries.

A series of tit-for-tat air raids were then staged over the region's frontier in 2019, with brinkmanship and radio silence between the two governments heightening fears of another all-out war.

During Prime Minister Imran Khan's government, diplomatic relations were downgraded and direct trade was suspended after a dispute over India's attempt to entrench its grip over the part of Kashmir it controls.

Khan was also critical of Modi and called for international action to stop what he claimed was a "genocide of Muslims" in the disputed region.

Agence France-Presse