Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan to attend Nawaz Sharif's swearing-in

NEW DELHI: Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan Sharat Sabharwal will tomorrow attend the swearing-in ceremony of PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif as the new Prime Minister of that country.

Terming the swearing-in ceremony as a "local event", External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid on Tuesday maintained that there was no invitation from Pakistan.

"As I understand, I think, it is a local event. Missions will all be represented. I am not sure if there are any invites for anybody to be coming. Certainly not to our knowledge and therefore there wasn't any need to take decision on this," Khurshid said when asked whether a decision has been taken on who will represent India at the ceremony tomorrow.

"Our High Commissioner was here. We talked this morning and he is going back to attend the swearing-in as other High Commissioners would," Khurshid told reporters here.

The Minister also noted that there would "probably be not enough time between the formal election in the National Assembly and the actual swearing-in".

Speculation has been rife over who will attend the swearing-in from the Indian side after Sharif in his interactions with Indian journalists in Lahore said he would be "very happy" to invite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Pakistan for his oath-taking ceremony as the new Premier.

Indian officials have consistently maintained that there has been no formal invitation.

Singh's special envoy Satinder Lambah had on May 27 met Sharif and discussed ways to take forward the dialogue process to address all the issues of concern between the two countries.

Lambah had travelled to Lahore as a follow up of Singh's conversation with Sharif on May 12 to greet him on his party's victory in the general elections there.