India’s foreign minister will be in Pakistan later this month to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, a government spokesman said Friday, in a rare visit by a top New Delhi official.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will be the first Indian foreign minister to visit Pakistan in nearly a decade.
The two nations are bitter adversaries with longstanding political tensions, having fought three wars and numerous smaller skirmishes since being carved out of the subcontinent’s partition in 1947.
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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a surprise visit to Pakistan in 2015, a year after taking office, sparking hopes of a thaw in relations.
But relations plummeted again in 2019 when Modi revoked the limited autonomy of Indian-administered Kashmir — a move widely celebrated across India but which led Pakistan to suspend bilateral trade and downgrade diplomatic ties with New Delhi.
The Himalayan region, home to a long-running and deadly insurgency against Indian rule, is divided between the two countries and claimed by both in full.
“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 SCO is a block of 10 nations established by China and Russia which have historically used the alliance to deepen their ties with Central Asian states and vie for influence in the region.
Recently, however, they have increasingly pitched the organisation as a competitor to the West.
The bloc claims to represent 40 per cent 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.
Pakistan’s 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”, said Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Washington-based Wilson Center.