Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) to be held in India next month, the Foreign Office said on Thursday.
“Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will be leading the Pakistan delegation to the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) being held on May 4-5 2023, in Goa, India,” FO spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch announced in a weekly media briefing today.
She said the foreign minister would be attending the SCO CFM meeting at the invitation of the current chairman of SCO CFM, Minister for External Affairs of the Republic of India Dr S. Jaishankar.
“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,” Baloch said. “Pakistan continues to participate in SCO meetings in keeping with our longstanding commitment to SCO.”
Earlier in January, India had invited Pakistan’s foreign minister to a meeting of the SCO that it is hosting in May, Indian media had reported, signalling a possible thaw in relations between the nuclear-armed rivals.
The invitation had come days after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had called for talks with India over all outstanding issues, including India-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), before clarifying that talks cannot take place until the “illegal actions of August 5, 2019” were reversed.
Foreign ministry spokespersons for the two countries had not immediately respond to requests from Reuters for comment on the media reports that Bilawal had been invited to the SCO foreign ministers meeting being hosted in Goa.
According to the Indian Express newspaper, the invitation from Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had been delivered by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. It had added that the “dates being looked at, as of now, are May 4 and 5”.
Bilawal would be its first foreign minister to visit India after a gap of nearly 12 years. The last foreign minister to visit India was Hina Rabbani Khar in July 2011, Indian Express had said.
The SCO comprises Pakistan, China, India, Russia and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Central Asian countries with whom Pakistan has recently been strengthening foreign ties — namely Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
In March, India had blocked Pakistan’s participation in the SCO seminar, an unprecedented move in the context of the forum, sources had told Dawn.
“India has misused its position as the Chair [of the SCO] and acted irresponsibly in denying a sovereign member state the right to participate in an SCO event,” an official had said.
India had claimed that Pakistan ‘skipped the event’ after it raised objections to ‘incorrect depiction’ of held Kashmir on the map.
Pakistan and India have fought three wars since independence from British rule in 1947. The divided Himalayan region of IIOJK was the root cause of two of those wars.
Tensions flared again in late 2019 when India unilaterally revoked the autonomous status of occupied Kashmir. Shehbaz said New Delhi’s actions resulted in “flagrant” human rights violations.
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