India foreign minister lands in Pakistan for rare visit

ISLAMABAD — Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, the first top Delhi diplomat to visit in nearly a decade.

Jaishankar’s plane landed just before 3:30pm (10:30 GMT) at an airbase near the capital Islamabad, a foreign office official said, as state TV showed him receiving a bouquet of flowers from a host delegation that did not include any senior ministers.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan are bitter adversaries with longstanding political tensions, having fought three wars and numerous smaller skirmishes since they were carved out of the subcontinent’s partition in 1947.

Relations have been particularly sour since 2019, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the limited autonomy of Indian-administered Kashmir.

The Himalayan region is divided between India and Pakistan but claimed by both in full, with each accusing the other of stoking militancy there.

Modi’s 2019 move was celebrated across India but led Pakistan to suspend bilateral trade and downgrade diplomatic ties with New Delhi.

Indian government spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said this month the agenda of Jaishankar’s visit would strictly follow the SCO schedule, which is due to discuss trade, humanitarian and social issues.

“The Indian foreign minister has not requested a bilateral meeting, nor have we extended an invitation to them,” Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on Sunday.

Former Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj was the last to visit Pakistan in 2015, arriving for a summit on Afghanistan.

Modi also made a surprise visit to Pakistan that year, shortly after taking office for his first term, sparking short-lived hopes of a thaw in relations.

The SCO is a block of 10 nations established by China and Russia, which have used the alliance to deepen their ties with Central Asian states and vie for influence in the region.

However, they have recently pitched the organisation as a competitor to the West.

The bloc claims to represent 40 per cent of the world’s population and about 30 per cent of its GDP, but its members have diverse political systems and even open disagreements with one another.

Pakistan’s former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was in Goa last year — also a rare visit — for an SCO meeting where he and Jaishankar were involved in a verbal spat.

It was the first official visit by a senior Pakistani official to their eastern neighbour since 2016, but the two foreign ministers did not hold a one-on-one meeting.