India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Pakistan this month, his ministry has announced.
This will be the first visit by a high ranking Indian minister to Pakistan in nearly a decade.
The trip comes after Mr Jaishankar’s Pakistani counterpart attended a similar meeting of foreign ministers from the SCO in India last year – he was the first senior Pakistani politician to visit since 2011.
Relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours have been tense for years and they have fought three wars since they became independent nations in 1947 – two of them over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
The SCO is a political union of countries formed to discuss security and economic matters in Central Asia.
The organisation was created by China, Russia and four Central Asian countries in 2001 as a countermeasure to limit the influence of Western alliances such as Nato.
India and Pakistan joined the group in 2017.
While India chaired the SCO in 2023, Pakistan will be hosting this year’s summit from 15 October to 16 October.
At a press briefing on Friday, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal confirmed that Mr Jaishankar will lead the Indian delegation to Pakistan.
The last time an Indian foreign minister visited the nation was in 2015, when Sushma Swaraj attended a security conference in Islamabad and held rare talks with Pakistani officials.
Days later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also made a surprise trip to Lahore where he met then Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Ties between India and Pakistan have always been strained but they hit a new low in 2019, when India launched strikes in Pakistani territory, following a militant attack on Indian troops in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Both India and Pakistan claim Kashmir in full, but control only parts of it. Separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir has led to thousands of deaths over three decades. India accuses Pakistan of supporting insurgents but its neighbour denies this.
A thaw of relations seemed in sight last year when Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari visited the Indian state of Goa for a SCO meeting.
But Mr Zardari said his visit was “focussed exclusively on the SCO” and did not hold any direct talks with Mr Jaishankar during his trip.
In an interview with the BBC at that time, he said that the onus was on India to restart peace talks between the two countries.
