SCO Summit 2024: S Jaishankar reaches Islamabad, exchanges pleasantries with Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif

New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday reached Islamabad to represent India at a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting being hosted by Pakistan.

Jaishankar's visit comes almost nine years after his predecessor Sushma Swaraj had visited the capital of the neighbouring country in December 2015 and had given consent to restart the stalled bilateral dialogue.

He already ruled out any possibility of any bilateral talks with his counterpart Ishaq Dar, who recently equated Kashmir with Palestine and noted that both were issues of concern for Pakistan.

The key leaders of the ruling coalition in Pakistan, including the former prime minister, M Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and chief minister of the neighbouring country’s Punjab, Mariam Nawaz Sharif, and Pakistan People’s Party’s leader Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, however, sent out subtle messages to New Delhi, making public comments arguing for better relations with India. New Delhi, however, stuck to its stand that India would not hold any talks with Pakistan unless the neighbouring country would not stop exporting terror across the border.

Jaishankar was welcomed by an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Pakistan after he landed at a military airport in Rawalpindi.

He attended an informal dinner hosted by Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in honour of the leaders of the delegations from the SCO nations. He will represent Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 23^rd meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of Governments (CHG) on Wednesday before returning to New Delhi.

“India remains actively engaged in the SCO format, including various mechanisms and initiatives within the SCO framework,” the Ministry of External Affairs stated in New Delhi.

Russia and China had launched the SCO between 1996 and 2001 to serve as a strategic counterweight to NATO. India and Pakistan had joined the bloc in 2017. With Iran and Belarus joining the SCO in 2023 and 2024, the bloc presently comprises 10 members.

Shehbaz Sharif had a few weeks back sent a formal invitation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to attend the SCO CHG meeting. New Delhi, however, decided that Jaishankar would represent Modi at the meeting.

Jaishankar's was the first visit by a minister from India to the capital of Pakistan after Rajnath Singh, then Minister of Home Affairs, had attended a SAARC meeting in Islamabad in August 2016. Modi had decided against attending the SAARC summit in Islamabad in November 2016 in the wake of the back-to-back attacks in India by the terrorist organisations based in Pakistan. The summit had been cancelled as other SAARC leaders had also decided not to attend it.

The SCO meeting in Islamabad on Wednesday is thus going to be the first multilateral event hosted by Pakistan with high-level representation from India.

Jaishankar’s predecessor Swaraj had visited Islamabad in December 2015, just a few days before Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore to attend the wedding ceremony of the granddaughter of Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister of Pakistan. Swaraj and her then counterpart Sartaj Aziz had agreed to resume the stalled India-Pakistan dialogue. But the series of terror attacks in India in 2016 by the outfits based in Pakistan prompted New Delhi to keep the talks with Islamabad suspended.

Bilawal had attended an SCO meeting at Goa in India in May 2023 as the foreign minister of Pakistan. He and his host Jaishankar had traded barbs on Kashmir, albeit through media.