External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will travel to Pakistan to attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation this month. This will be the first visit by any Indian foreign minister to Pakistan since December 2015. Late former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj visited Islamabad in 2015 to attend a security conference on Afghanistan.
The announcement was made by external affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal Friday.
Pakistan is hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Council of Heads of Government (CHG) meeting in mid-October.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a permanent intergovernmental international organization established on June 15, 2001, in Shanghai by Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan.
Its predecessor was the mechanism of the Shanghai Five. Currently, the SCO countries include nine Member States – India, Iran, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The SCO has three Observer States – Afghanistan, Mongolia and Belarus. At the Samarkand SCO Summit in 2022, the process of raising the status of the Republic of Belarus within the Organization to the level of a member state started.
The SCO has 14 Dialogue Partners – Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bahrain, Egypt, Cambodia, Qatar, Kuwait, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Sri Lanka. In 2020, when India hosted the SCO head of government level meeting virtually during Covid-19, Pakistan was represented by Pakistan’s Parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs.
With inputs from agencies.
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Jaishankar to visit Pakistan for SCO summit, first by an Indian foreign minister since 2015
