ISLAMABAD: In a widely shared photograph, Pakistani foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari was seen on Friday with his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar ahead of a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Foreign Ministers in Goa during the first high-profile visit to India by a Pakistani official in almost a decade.
SCO foreign ministers began to gather in Goa on Thursday for Friday’s meetings on regional security matters, including adding Iran and Belarus to a union of nations seen as a counterweight to Western influence in Eurasia.
The foreign ministers, including Russia’s Sergei Lavrov and China’s Qin Gang, will prepare the ground for an SCO summit in India in July that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are expected to attend in person.
The SCO is a political and security union of countries spanning much of Eurasia, including China, India and Russia. Formed in 2001 by Russia, China and ex-Soviet states in Central Asia, the body has been expanded to include India and Pakistan.
“Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari has arrived to attend the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers,” the foreign office said in a message to journalists, sharing a picture of the Pakistani official and his Indian counterpart.
Bhutto-Zardari is the first senior Pakistani leader to visit India in nine years amid longstanding tensions between the large, nuclear-armed South Asian rivals.
However, there are no plans for Bhutto-Zardari to meet Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar separately and his visit was not expected to lead to a breakthrough in strained Indian-Pakistani relations.
“During my visit, which is focused exclusively on the SCO, I look forward to constructive discussions with my counterparts from friendly countries,” Bhutto-Zardari tweeted before arriving in Goa.
Relations between India and Pakistan have been fraught for decades and they have fought three wars, two of them over the Muslim-majority Himalayan region of Kashmir, which they both claim in full but rule in part.
