Pakistani Minister Bilawal to visit India for SCO meeting

India and Pakistan may finally have a formal engagement at the ministerial level after a long hiatus of almost seven-and-a-half years.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is likely to play host to his counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in Goa early next month. Zardari will visit Goa, primarily to take part in the meeting of the foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on May 4 and 5. He, however, may have a bilateral meeting with Jaishankar.

Jaishankar, being the host of the meeting of the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers, is likely to have bilateral meetings with each of his guests on the sideline of the conclave.

Zardari’s meeting with Jaishankar in Goa may be followed by a visit of Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif for the SCO summit, which his counterpart in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, may host in July.

Sharif’s brother M Nawaz Sharif’s visit to New Delhi to attend the swearing-in ceremony of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2014 was the last visit by a head of the government of Pakistan. Jaishankar’s predecessor late Sushma Swaraj’s meeting with her counterpart and Sharif’s advisor on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, in Islamabad in December 2015 was the last bilateral meeting between the top diplomats of the two nations. Aziz’s visit to Amritsar for a multilateral meeting on Afghanistan in December 2016 was the last by a Foreign Minister or equivalent of Pakistan to India. The complex relations between the two nations hit a new low over a series of attacks on India by terrorist organizations of Pakistan in 2016, the killing of India’s paramilitary personnel by the operatives of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) of Pakistan and the retaliatory air-strikes by India in February 2019, as well as Pakistan’s opposition to India’s move to strip Jammu and Kashmir of its special status and the reorganization of the state into two union territories in August 2019.

India at present holds the chair of the SCO, which was floated by Russia and China between 1996 and 2001 as a strategic counterweight to NATO led by Europe and the US. India and Pakistan formally joined the bloc in 2017.

New Delhi had sent out invitations to Pakistan, China and other SCO member nations early this year to participate in the SCO conclaves leading to the summit or the meeting of the Council of the Heads of States of the bloc’s member-nations.

That Zardari will lead the delegation from Islamabad in the SCO meeting in Goa was confirmed by Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Pakistan, on Thursday. “Our participation in the meeting reflects Pakistan’s commitment to the SCO charter and processes and the importance that Pakistan accords to the region in its foreign policy priorities,” she told journalists, pointed out that Zardari had also attended the last meeting of the SCO foreign ministers in Tashkent in July 2022.

Baloch underlined that the Pakistani Foreign Minister’s visit to India was “not a bilateral visit but a visit in SCO context”. She, however, dodged questions from journalists on the possibility of a bilateral meeting between Zardari and Jaishankar, stating that “further announcements” would be made when decisions would be taken in the “coming days”.

Her counterpart in New Delhi and the spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), Arindam Bagchi, too did not rule out the possibility of a bilateral meeting between the two ministers on the sideline of the SCO meeting. “I think it is premature. Let's see the full participation. Usually, the EAM (Jaishankar) does try to hold as many bilateral meetings as it can on the margins of such kinds of multilateral meetings,” he said, citing the example of the External Affairs Minister holding bilateral meetings with all his counterparts who had come to New Delhi for the G20 Foreign Ministers' meeting on March 1 and 2 last.