External Affairs Minister of India S Jaishankar would visit Pakistan on October 15 for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, the Indian foreign ministry spokesperson said on Friday.
“The external affairs minister will lead a delegation to Pakistan to participate in the SCO Summit which will be held on October 15 and 16,” Randhir Jaiswal said at a weekly press briefing.
The SCO, which includes India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, is a significant economic and security bloc that has become one of the largest trans-regional international organizations.
Within this important regional framework, both Pakistan and India have the opportunity to participate in summit meetings.
It will be the first trip by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistan in nearly a decade.
Earlier, the Foreign Office confirmed that Prime Minister Modi had been invited to the SCO Council of Heads of Government meeting, which Pakistan is hosting later this month, under its rotating chairmanship.
“The agenda of the visit is the SCO summit,” government spokesman Randhir Jaiswal told a news conference, adding that there “should not be any thought” about any other takeaways related to the two countries’ ties.
The bloc claims to represent 40 percent of the world’s population and about 30 percent of its GDP, but its members have diverse political systems and even open disagreements with one another.
Former foreign minister Bhutto Zardari was in Goa last year - also a rare visit – for an SCO meeting where he and Jaishankar were involved in a verbal spat.
The two did not hold a one-on-one meeting.
India’s decision to attend the summit is “undoubtedly motivated more by (its) commitment to the SCO than to a desire to move the needle forward on relations with Pakistan”, Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center, told AFP.
(With input from AFP)
