Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar arrived in Islamabad on Tuesday to attend a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit, the first visit by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistani soil in nearly a decade .
Mr. Jaishankar and Pakistani Prime Minister Mr. Shehbaz Sharif greeted each other with a grim-faced handshake at the start of an official dinner for visiting European Union leaders.
India and Pakistan have been historical enemies since their partition in 1947 into two separate states at the end of British colonization. The two nuclear-armed neighbors have fought three major wars and experienced numerous localized conflicts.
At the beginning of October, the spokesperson for the Indian government, Randhir Jaiswal, indicated that the agenda for Mr. Jaishankar’s visit would follow the schedule of the SCO, whose summit opened on Tuesday for two days.
He specified that the discussions would focus on commercial, humanitarian and social issues.
“The Indian Foreign Minister did not request a bilateral meeting and we did not offer him one”his Pakistani counterpart Ishaq Dar said on Sunday.
Relations have been particularly tense since 2019 and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to revoke the limited autonomy enjoyed by Kashmir.
A source of permanent tension, this Himalayan territory, with a Muslim majority, is geographically divided between India and Pakistan, both of which claim sovereignty.
The decision of Mr. Modi, popular in India, led Pakistan to suspend its commercial relations with its neighbor and seriously degraded diplomatic ties with New Delhi.
The two rival countries have since regularly accused each other of spying and supporting rebels in each other’s territory.
Hopes dashed
The last Indian Foreign Minister to make an official trip to Pakistani soil was Sushma Swaraj in 2015, for a summit on Afghanistan.
Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar (l) upon his arrival in Islamabad, October 15, 2024 in Pakistan / – / Pakistan Press Information Department (PID)/AFP
That year, Prime Minister Modi also visited Pakistan, just elected for his first term, raising hopes of improving relations between the two countries, which were quickly disappointed.
Last year, the former head of Pakistani diplomacy Bhutto Zardari visited India in Goa during a rare visit for a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and on this occasion he had a verbal altercation with his Indian counterpart Mr. Jaishankar.
The SCO is a group of ten nations created by China and Russia with the aim of discussing mutual security and political and military cooperation among its member countries.
The bloc is sometimes presented as an alternative to the Western-dominated NATO military alliance.
