Web Desk
India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar will be visiting Pakistan on October 15 to attend the summit conference of Shanghai cooperation organization being held in Islamabad.
This will be the first visit by a high ranking Indian minister to Pakistan in nearly a decade.
The trip comes after Jaishankar’s Pakistani counterpart attended a similar meeting of foreign ministers from the SCO in India last year – he was the first senior Pakistani politician to visit since 2011, BBC reported.
The SCO is a political union of countries formed to discuss security and economic matters in Central Asia.
The organisation was created by China, Russia and four Central Asian countries in 2001 as a countermeasure to limit the influence of Western alliances such as Nato.
India and Pakistan joined the group in 2017.
While India chaired the SCO in 2023, Pakistan will be hosting this year’s summit from 15 October to 16 October.
The last time an Indian foreign minister visited Pakistan was in 2015, when Sushma Swaraj attended a security conference in Islamabad and held talks with Pakistani officials.
Days later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also made a surprise trip to Lahore where he met then Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
A thaw of relations seemed in sight last year when Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari visited the Indian state of Goa for a SCO meeting.
That visit was “focussed exclusively on the SCO” and Bilawal Bhutto Zardari did not hold any direct talks with Mr Jaishankar during his trip.
