External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar may call upon the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to hold the sponsors of terrorism accountable when he will host his counterparts from the other member nations of the bloc, including Bilawal Bhutto Zardari of Pakistan, for a meeting in Goa on Friday.
Jaishankar exchanged pleasantries with Bilawal during a dinner he hosted for the foreign ministers of the SCO nations on Thursday. He, however, is unlikely to hold a bilateral meeting with his counterpart from the neighbouring country.
New Delhi still does not have any plan to use the SCO forum to directly criticise Pakistan for exporting terror to India, but it may retaliate if the foreign minister of the neighbouring country tries to vitiate the atmosphere by raising the bilateral dispute over Jammu and Kashmir during the conclave, a source told DH.
Bilawal landed in Panaji on Thursday just as the foreign ministers of the other SCO member nations arrived for a meeting, which Jaishankar will host at a beach resort in Benaulim in south Goa. This is the first visit by a foreign minister of Pakistan to India after almost six years.
Jaishankar had bilateral meetings with the SCO Secretary-General Zhang Ming as well as Sergey Lavrov, Qin Gang and Bakhtiyor Saidov, his counterparts from Russia, China and Uzbekistan, in Benaulim on Thursday. He may have similar bilateral meetings with a few other foreign ministers of the other SCO member states on Friday.
But no formal bilateral meeting between Jaishankar and Bilawal on the sideline of the conclave of the SCO foreign ministers has been scheduled so far.
With his coalition government struggling to survive amid deepening political and economic crises, Pakistani Prime Shehbaz Sharif, himself, took to Twitter to defend his decision to send his foreign minister to attend the SCO meeting hosted by India. Pakistan’s decision to attend the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers’ meeting in India reflected its commitment to the charter of the eight-nation bloc and multilateralism, he tweeted, adding: “We are committed to playing our part to advance our shared values of peace & stability in the region. We are all for win-win understandings based on connectivity, trade and mutually advantageous cooperation.”
“During my visit, which is focused exclusively on the SCO, I look forward to constructive discussions with my counterparts from friendly countries,” tweeted Bilawal.
The possibility of a bilateral meeting between India and Pakistan diminished after the killing of five Rashtriya Rifles soldiers in a terrorist attack at Mendher in the Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir on April 20. The investigation hinted that it could be a hit-and-run offensive by the terrorists, who might have had sneaked into India from across the country’s Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan. New Delhi also received inputs about the activation of “launch pads” across the LoC for the infiltration of terrorists from Pakistan to India. Two terrorists were killed by the security forces in an encounter at Baramulla in J&K after they had sneaked into India from the territory under the control of Pakistan.
In such a scenario, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is not keen to take the risk of going into a formal engagement between the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan. The government also factored in the state assembly elections in Karnataka, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party facing a tough challenge from the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular). The state will go to polls on May 10. Besides, assembly polls in several other states would also take place over the next few months, leading to the parliamentary elections in April-May 2024.