Common economic interests may be the basis of the thaw between Pakistan and India.

Abbas Nasir writes:  Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Pakistan recently. Modi said he greatly appreciated Pakistan’s leader Sharif for personally receiving and seeing him off at the airport – on a non-state, unofficial visit.  Relations between the two countries have been dogged by the dispute over the Kashmir region, which dates back to the partition of India in 1947 after the British decided to leave.

Nearly 1.4 billion people inhabit the two traditional South Asian rival countries alone, and with their growing economies and energy needs, and the need for newer, more diverse markets and trading opportunities, the future of the troubled region once defined by conflict may well be defined by common economic interests.

Since then, several attempts to restart the stalled process have come to naught.

Even when images of the two leaders caught in a brief yet seemingly intense chat appeared in the media from the Paris Earth summit last month, few would have imagined the pace at which efforts towards normalisation would proceed.

Just three weeks ago, on December 7, the national security advisers to the two prime ministers met in Bangkok for a meeting that took the media by surprise. Their five-hour meeting took matters forward as three days later the Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj arrived in the Pakistani capital to attend a conference between Kabul and Islamabad on Afghanistan.

Analysts are asking what will happen if another terrorist attack on Indian soil is traced to militants across the border.

On the flip side, what is fuelling optimism is the huge peace dividend. Just this month the two countries joined Turkmenistan and Afghanistan in the ground-breaking ceremony of a natural gas pipepline called TAPI which will bring Turkmen natural gas via Afghanistan and Pakistan to India.

Then, the Iran leg of the Iran-Pakistan-India oil pipeline had already been built, and the rest is likely to be completed within a couple of years once United Nations sanctions on Tehran are lifted.

Pakistan has also concluded a $46bn China-Pakistan Economic Corridor aimed at connecting the underdeveloped western region of China to Gwadar Port on Pakistan’s Balochistan coast just south of the Hormuz Straits.

The pro-business Indian prime minister, addressing the opening of the parliament building in Kabul, called upon Pakistan to serve as a bridge between South Asia and Central Asia.

The future of the troubled region once defined by conflict may well be defined by common economic interests.

It appears that even Pakistan’s military, which has traditionally taken a tough, hard line on India, has begun to understand this.