Neither India nor Pakistan has requested a bilateral meeting at the SCO

File photo of Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar. | Photo credit: Reuters

Neither India nor Pakistan has requested a bilateral meeting when Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar lands in Islamabad for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) heads of government meeting on October 15-16, Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said.

He said the government plans to welcome Mr Jaishankar with utmost protocol, as is Pakistan's duty as a good host, comments which follow Mr Jaishankar's remark last week that he would attend the meeting as a good member of the SCO.

While Mr. Jaishankar and other leaders of the 10-member SCO, including Iranian Vice President Mohammadreza Aref and the prime ministers of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, are expected to landing in Islamabad on Tuesday, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang will arrive a day early on Monday for bilateral meetings with Pakistani leaders.

Although the MEA did not confirm which of the leaders Mr Jaishankar would hold bilateral talks with during his visit, all eyes will be on any meeting with the Chinese leader, ahead of the BRICS summit in Russia from 22-24 October, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will come face to face, with speculation that they will meet to try to resolve the military standoff on the Line of Actual Control.

With neither side having much hope of an India-Pakistan meeting in Islamabad, experts are downplaying the impact of Mr. Jaishankar's visit, the first by an Indian foreign minister in nearly a year. decade, on bilateral relations. In 2015, former Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj visited Pakistan for a conference on the Heart of Asia, but this visit was also marked by a bilateral meeting and the announcement of the relaunch of bilateral dialogue global, which failed a month later after Pathankot. terrorist attacks.

The Indian Foreign Minister has not requested any meeting, nor have we requested a bilateral meeting. He will come as a guest of the SCO, and discussions will be held on multilateral issues, Dar told the media, briefing the press on the arrangements for the SCO meeting, which he said was the first major multilateral event of its kind in Pakistan in almost 20 years. three decades.

In March this year, Dar had said Pakistan would seriously consider resuming trade ties with India, which had been suspended since 2019, but there has been progress in the move. Asked by reporters on Sunday whether the issue could be raised during or on the sidelines of the SCO meeting, Dar said that while Pakistan was discussing initiatives such as the TAPI energy pipeline (Turkmenistan -Pakistan-Afghanistan-India) and others with some SCO members separately, these were not part of the SCO discussions.

In a broader context, we are talking about connectivity and road and rail links with many SCO members bilaterally. But the SCO's mandate will be multilateral and the agenda is fixed, he said.

The Pakistani government is concerned about security arrangements, especially as the opposition party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI), whose leader former Prime Minister Imran Khan is still in prison, announced a major demonstration in the capital on October 15, unless the government allows Mr. Khan to meet his supporters and lawyers.

Thousands of PTI supporters had invaded Islamabad's D-chowk last week to protest the release of Mr Khan, who has been charged in a number of cases, and clashed with police there, fueling fears of 'a repetition. Ahead of the SCO, Pakistani security officials said more than 9,000 police officers were on duty and protests had been banned in Islamabad, Karachi and other cities.

In an unexpected broadside, a senior Pakistani minister appeared to blame India for the PTI protests.

Pakistan's neighbor cannot digest the fact that we are going to host the SCO summit and hence they have caused disruptions, in connivance with the PTI, Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan's Minister for Development Planning and Planning, said on Saturday. special initiatives, although he did not directly name India.

The MEA has not issued any response to this statement.