Friday morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India’s military had shut up Pakistan’s army during the deadliest week of fighting in more than a year. A few hours later, he congratulated citizens from both countries who shared a Nobel Peace Prize.

In splitting the award between Indian child rights activist Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel committee weighed in on decades of animosity between the neighbors holding a fifth of the world’s population. Analysts aren’t expecting much to change.

“It’s all very well for do-gooder Scandinavian types to try to nudge them together, but it’s not going to mean much,” said Burzine Waghmar, a member of the South Asia Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. “It’s just symbolic, with protocol gestures.”

The award came during a week in which India and Pakistan traded blame for tit-for-tat gunfire that killed at least 14 people, including civilians, in the disputed region of Kashmir. Yousafzai Friday said she would like both Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Modi to attend the award ceremony for the peace prize in Oslo on Dec.10.

“The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism,” it wrote yesterday while declaring the winners of the annual prize in Oslo, Norway.

“Alone, Malala and Satyarthi are both great individuals whose work in education with young people links them,” Nikita Sud, an associate professor of development studies at the University of Oxford, said by phone. “But it’s too simplistic to boil down their identities to Hindus, Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis — and makes them part of their national jingoism, which neither have chosen to do.”

Matthew Nelson, who specializes on Pakistan at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, called the award “a very helpful move” that may provide an opportunity for Modi and Sharif “to appreciate one another’s countries publicly.”

While Modi congratulated both peace prize winners on Twitter Friday, Sharif only feted Yousafzai in a text message to reporters from his office.