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India’s foreign minister S Jaishankar will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Pakistan this month, his ministry has announced. <\/p>\n
This will be the first visit by a high ranking Indian minister to Pakistan in nearly a decade.<\/p>\n
The trip comes after Mr Jaishankar’s Pakistani counterpart attended<\/a> a similar meeting of foreign ministers from the SCO in India last year – he was the first senior Pakistani politician to visit since 2011. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The SCO is a political union of countries formed to discuss security and economic matters in Central Asia.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n India and Pakistan joined the group in 2017.<\/p>\n While India chaired the SCO in 2023, Pakistan will be hosting this year’s summit from 15 October to 16 October. <\/p>\n At a press briefing on Friday, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal confirmed that Mr Jaishankar will lead the Indian delegation to Pakistan. <\/p>\n The last time an Indian foreign minister visited the nation was in 2015, when Sushma Swaraj attended a security conference<\/a> in Islamabad and held rare talks with Pakistani officials. <\/p>\n Days later, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi also made a surprise trip to Lahore<\/a> where he met then Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n In an interview with the BBC at that time, he said<\/a> that the onus was on India to restart peace talks between the two countries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n