By Muhammad Luqman
New Delhi has announced to invite Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit when it hosts the event later this year.
“India will be hosting the heads of government summit later this year. As per established practice and procedure within SCO, all the eight members, as well as four observer states and other international dialogue partners, will be invited,” Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in the capital New Delhi on Thursday.
According to Indian media, a final decision on whether Khan attends the meeting, scheduled for October, is to be made by Islamabad.
In past years, member countries have sometimes sent their foreign ministers instead of their heads of government, Raveesh Kumar said.
If Imran Khan decides to come, analysts believe, it will be his first visit to India as prime minister, setting the stage for a meeting with Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, creating a possible thaw in the estrained ties between the two nuclear-armed South Asian states.
In August, India’s decision to revoke the special constitutional status of the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir and impose a lockdown on the region further spiked tensions between the two nations, who have fought two of their three full-scale wars over Kashmir.
Kumar said the particular meeting is conducted annually at the prime ministerial level with a focus on multilateral economic and trade cooperation.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), or Shanghai Pact,is a Eurasian political, economic, and security alliance, the creation of which was announced on 15 June 2001 in Shanghai, China by the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Charter, formally establishing the organisation, was signed in June 2002 and entered into force on 19 September 2003.
The original five nations, with the exclusion of Uzbekistan, were previously members of the Shanghai Five group, founded on 26 April 1996.
Since then, the organisation has expanded its membership to eight countries when India and Pakistan joined SCO as full members on 9 June 2017 at a summit in Astana, Kazakhstan.
