India and Pakistan rule out bilateral talks at SCO summit
Both New Delhi and Islamabad have ruled out the possibility of holding bilateral discussions during the upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit scheduled to be held in Pakistan next week.
Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar will lead the Indian delegation at the meeting, marking the first visit of a foreign minister from his country to Islamabad in nine years. Pakistan had previously invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to attend.
Jaishankar, however, clarified that bilateral talks would not be held during his upcoming visit. “I am not going there to discuss India-Pakistan relations,” he said at an event, answering a question about his purpose in attending. “I am going there to be a good member of the SCO.”
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch, when asked about possible talks between the two rivals on the sidelines of the SCO summit, referred back to Jaishankar’s remarks, terming them “self-explanatory.”
The last Indian foreign minister to visit the neighboring country was then External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who attended the Heart of Asia conference in 2015. Since then, relations between the two nuclear-powers have deteriorated.
Ties have been largely frozen since 2019, after the deadly Pulwama attack in Kashmir that killed 42 Indian troops. It elicited a strong response from New Delhi, which conducted a “surgical strike” against a terrorist outfit in Balakot, located in the Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
That same year, Islamabad downgraded relations with India after Prime Minister Modi’s government abrogated Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted a certain level of autonomy to the Jammu and Kashmir region, claimed by both India and Pakistan.
While Pakistan has raised the Kashmir issue at both domestic and international forums, New Delhi has used the same platforms to accuse its neighbor of supporting terrorism. “Pakistan’s cross-border terrorism policy will never succeed,” Jaishankar said during his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York last month. He also vowed that New Delhi would impose “consequences” for actions by Islamabad, indirectly referring to increased militancy in Kashmir in recent months after years of relative calm.
Describing Pakistan as a “dysfunctional nation,” India’s top diplomat claimed that “some countries make conscious choices with disastrous consequences.” “When this polity instills fanaticism among its people, its GDP can only be measured in terms of radicalization, and its exports in terrorism,” he added.
Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh has also recently denounced Pakistan for seeking funding from global financial institutions to sustain a “terrorism factory” despite the country going through a severe economic crisis.
Earlier this year, however, Jaishankar stated that resolving disputes with China and Pakistan was among New Delhi’s top priorities during the Modi government’s third term.
