ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif confirmed this week that Islamabad would invite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to this year’s upcoming Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit.
Pakistan will host the SCO’s Heads of Governments meeting on October 15-16. Islamabad currently holds the rotating chairmanship of the SCO Council of Heads of Government, which is the second-highest decision-making forum of the political and security bloc that also includes Russia and China.
Relations between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan have been fraught for years, making visits by senior officials of the two countries to each other’s nations rare. The two neighbors 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.
When asked whether Pakistan will invite Modi to the upcoming SCO summit during an interview with Dawn News on Tuesday, Asif said:
“Yes, certainly. There shouldn’t be any doubt about it.”
Asif noted that India had also invited Pakistan’s then foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari in 2023 to attend an SCO meeting which he had accepted.
The Pakistani defense minister said any country that hosts an SCO summit does not have the “choice” to invite some members and not others.
“If any country imposes such conditions, I think they are inappropriate and the SCO will not accept it either,” Asif explained.
Bhutto-Zardari’s visit to India in 2023 was the first one by a high-profile Pakistani official since then prime minister Nawaz Sharif attended Modi’s swearing-in in 2014 and de facto Pakistani foreign minister Sartaj Aziz went to Amritsar in December 2016 to attend the Heart of Asia conference.
India has for years accused Pakistan of helping separatists who have battled Indian security forces in its part of Kashmir since the late 1980s. Pakistan denies the accusation and says it only provides diplomatic and moral support for Kashmiris seeking self-determination.
Violence in the region has eased recently although the neighbors have not sat down for talks on any major issues in years.
