All stakeholders taken into confidence over Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s visit to India, junior minister Hina Rabbani Khar said on Friday.
“There has been no opposition from any side and I think that shows everybody has the interest of the state at their heart,” she said at the Shaukat Piracha’s show Rubaroo.
The scion of the Bhutto dynasty is set to become the first foreign minister to visit India in over a decade. He would attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Goa next month.
This is the first time since 2016 that the most senior Foreign Office representative would visit India.
Bilawal will be leading the Pakistan delegation to the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM), which will take place in the Indian city of Goa on May 4 and 5, Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch said at a media briefing last week.
The foreign minister would be attending the meeting at the invitation of his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who heads the foreign ministers’ council of SCO, which is a regional political and security bloc whose members include Russia, China, India and Pakistan.
State Foreign Minister Khar was of the view that Bilawal’s visit has to be taken seriously. She clarified that Bilawal was going on a visit to India to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting.
“The membership of SCO was obtained by overcoming bilateral differences,” she said, adding that every minister has their own engagements under which the visit is done. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif also wanted to go to the neighbouring country but could not go due to his engagements, Khar added.
She went on to add that the role of ministers in the SCO meetings was different and matters are decided at the ministerial level.
“No meeting was requested by Pakistan. In order to be on the negotiation table it is necessary to agree on the talks,” she said in response to a query pertaining to the impasse on meetings between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. She used the term “false equivalence” while responding to a query that a meeting took place between heads of the state at the SAARC summit during the former dictator Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s tenure.
The state minister highlighted that the situation was different post-August 5, 2019 when India scrapped the autonomy of occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
“We cannot sit alone at any negotiation table. We need a player on the other side. The moment player arises on the other side you will find us in tandem. It takes two to tango in order to have the other side on the negotiation table,” Khar said.
She ruled out any impression that Pakistan does not want any normalisation with India, highlighting that the onus was on Indian PM Narendra Modi and his government.
“If at any point India decides to create a legacy, whichever government, as a big player in the region uses its weight to put it together… There is complete consensus in Pakistan in all the different elements of the state that Pakistan will not come in the way in fact will promote and propagate,” she said.
