India will invite Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting to be held in May this year. This comes a day after Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto and Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang were handed over invitations for the SCO summit in Goa.
The invitations were sent as part of the laid down procedure but there is no confirmation whether Bilawal Bhutto and Qin Gang will attend the event.
If the Pakistan prime minister or the foreign minister decide to attend the meeting in person, then it will be the first such visit from Islamabad to India since 2011. The then Pakistan foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar had visited India that year.
The ties between India and Pakistan came under severe strain after India’s warplanes pounded a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in February 2019 in response to the Pulwama terror attack.
The relations further deteriorated after India in August 2019 announced the withdrawal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special powers and the bifurcation of the erstwhile state into Union territories.
India is the current chair of the eight-nation SCO. The meeting of the SCO foreign ministers is expected to take place in Goa later this year.
India took over the chairmanship of the nine-member grouping last September and will host the key ministerial meetings and summit in Goa in the first week of May. The SCO also includes China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Invites have also been sent to the foreign ministers of China and Russia along with the other Central Asian countries.
