Pakistan (Commonwealth Union)_ India will extend an invitation to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) foreign ministers’ conference in May. Invitations to the SCO meeting in Goa were sent to Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto and Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang. The invitations were sent in accordance with protocol, but neither Bilawal Bhutto nor Qin Gang’s attendance has been confirmed.
This move comes on the heels of Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s statement that his country has learned its lesson from three wars with India and now seeks to establish a peaceful relationship with its neighbor. Accordingly, if the Pakistani prime minister or the foreign minister were to participate in the conference in person, then it would be the first such visit from Islamabad to India since 2011. To note, the then-Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar visited India in 2011. After India’s warplanes bombed a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training center in Pakistan’s Balakot in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack, the relations between India and Pakistan were severely strained.
In August 2019, India announced the removal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special powers and the division of the former state into Union territories, which further strained ties. Concerning the issue of cross-border terrorism from Pakistan, the ties between the two countries have been tenuous for several years, while Islamabad has demanded the reinstatement of Article 370 for the former Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir prior to any discussions.
The last Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit took place in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The present head of the eight-nation SCO is India. The SCO foreign ministers conference is anticipated to be held in Goa in May. In the first week of May, India will host the main ministerial meetings and conference in Goa for the nine-member grouping it took in last September. India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are also members of the 20-year-old SCO, and Iran will be joining the group this year. Along with the other Central Asian nations, the foreign ministers of China and Russia have also been invited.
