Indian Foreign Minister to visit Pakistan for SCO summit

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will visit Pakistan to participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit this month.

The visit will be the first by an Indian foreign minister to Pakistan in nearly a decade and will take place at a time when relations between the nuclear-armed neighbours have been strained over the Kashmir dispute.

Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said Jaishankar will lead the Indian delegation to Pakistan for the summit of Eurasian leaders on October 15 and 16 but did not say if he would meet any Pakistani leaders on the sidelines.

The South Asian neighbours have fought three wars, including two over control of the disputed Kashmir region in the Himalayas. New Delhi accuses Islamabad of aiding and abetting militants fighting Indian rule in the region, a charge Pakistan denies.

Relations between the two countries have gone through periods of thaw from time to time but have been largely frozen as they downgraded diplomatic ties in tit-for-tat moves in 2019 after New Delhi scrapped Kashmir's special autonomy and split it into two federally administered territories.

The last high-level visit between the two countries took place in May 2023 when Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, Pakistan's foreign minister at the time, attended the SCO foreign ministers' meeting in India's coastal state of Goa.

While Bhutto-Zardari did not meet any Indian leaders, he and Jaishankar used the forum to trade blame for their frosty ties.