New Delhi External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will visit Pakistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) conference on October 16 and 17.
The external affairs minister will head our delegation to Pakistan to attend the SCO summit, which will be place in Islamabad on October 15 and 16, according to Randhir Jaiswal, the ministry’s spokeswoman.
Pakistan had invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the SCO Council of Heads of Government (CHG) in-person meeting, however considering the fragile bilateral relations between both nations, Jaishankar would attend the meeting.
Pakistan will host the SCO conference because it currently holds the rotating chairperson of the CHG, the Eurasian group’s second highest decision-making body after the Council of Heads of State. PM Modi has been a frequent at heads-of-state summits, but he skipped the one in Kazakhstan this year, reportedly because it clashed with the Parliament session in early July.
The SCO is one of the few multilateral platforms where India and Pakistan have managed to collaborate, despite the tensions that have plagued the relationship since their aborted attempt to relaunch the dialogue process in 2015 and the terror strikes that followed.
While Indian delegations have flown to Pakistan for SCO exercises and vice versa, Pakistan’s then-foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari paid a visit to India last year for a SCO foreign ministers’ conference.
This cooperation is made feasible by the SCO Charter, which prohibits member nations from raising bilateral concerns.