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India invites Pak FM Bilawal Bhutto, Chief Justice for SCO meet
The foreign ministers’ meeting is expected to be held in Goa in the first week of May and the invitation for Bhutto Zardari was delivered by the Indian high commission in Islamabad,
Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and Chief Justice Umar Atta Bandial are among Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) leaders and dignitaries invited by India to meetings of the eight-member grouping to be held in the coming months.
The invitation to Bhutto Zardari had gone out recently with those for other SCO foreign ministers, including China’s Qin Gang, from the external affairs ministry, people familiar with the development said.
The foreign ministers’ meeting is expected to be held in Goa in the first week of May and the invitation for Bhutto Zardari was delivered by the Indian high commission in Islamabad, they said.
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Similarly, an invitation was delivered to the Pakistani Chief Justice’s office for the meeting of Chief Justices of SCO states to be hosted by India in March. There is still no official confirmation from the Pakistani side on whether Bhutto Zardari and Bandial will attend the meetings, people familiar with the matter in Islamabad said.
The invitation to Bhutto Zardari has attracted greater attention since it was delivered soon after Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered to hold talks with India and said he asked the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) leadership to help bring the two countries to the negotiating table. However, Sharif’s office subsequently linked any talks to India restoring Jammu and Kashmir’s special status.
India responded to Pakistan’s conditional offer of talks by saying an atmosphere free from terror and violence is a prerequisite for normal neighbourly ties. Bhutto Zardari and external affairs minister S Jaishankar had engaged in a war of words on the issues of terrorism and Kashmir on the margins of UN meetings in New York last December.
The people cited above described the invitation sent to Bhutto Zardari as a “routine matter” in line with India’s position as the current chair of SCO. “Such invitations are sent by all host countries and nothing more should be read into it,” one of the people said.
There is a particular focus on ensuring the smooth arrangement of all meetings as India is hosting the SCO for the first time and wants to ensure the successful conduct of all meetings, the people said.
The people familiar with developments in Islamabad said the Pakistani side is keen on its presence at the meetings in India though a call is yet to be taken if the country will be represented at the foreign ministers’ meeting by Bhutto Zardari or minister of state for foreign affairs Hina Rabbani Khar.
If the Pakistani side decides to attend, it will be the first such visit from Islamabad since 2011, when Khar travelled to New Delhi for a bilateral meeting. Then Pakistani premier Nawaz Sharif attended Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s swearing-in in May 2014, and Modi and then external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj both visited Pakistan in December 2015.
India and Pakistan have had no sustained and substantive contact since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, which effectively fractured relations and took them to an all-time low. A series of terror attacks blamed on Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and India’s scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019 further affected ties.
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The people said invitations for the SCO Summit, expected to be held in June, will also go out to all member states in the near future. The dates for all the SCO meetings are yet to be locked down firmly, given the largely informal methods of working in the bloc.
Pakistani officials have participated in other SCO meetings hosted by India, such as a gathering of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) held in New Delhi last year.
The SCO foreign ministers’ meeting will also be significant for the presence of China’s new foreign minister Qin Gang and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, given India’s military standoff with China on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and the Ukraine crisis. Both Qin and Lavrov have also been invited to a meeting of the G20 foreign ministers to be held in New Delhi during March 1-2.
There is also considerable interest in diplomatic circles in whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend both the SCO Summit in June and the G20 Summit in September. Putin skipped the G20 Summits in Italy in 2021 and Indonesia in 2022.
