- Wednesday, November 27, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
While the news that Pakistani foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will visit India in May to take part in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) foreign ministers’ meeting stole headlines since the relation between the two neighbours is not at their best at the moment, both countries said the visit should not be seen through the prism of bilateral tiies.
Bhutto-Zardari, who is the son of late Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto and former president Asif Ali Zardari, will be the first eminent politician from that country to set foot in India since former prime minister Nawaz Sharif who attended the swearing-in ceremony of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in 2014.
Speaking about his upcoming visit to India when he will go to the western state of Goa, Bhutto-Zardari, 34, said his participation in the SCO Council in India reflected Islamabad’s commitment to the bloc’s charter and should not be seen in terms of India-Pakistan relations.
Responding to a question on a programme on Pakistan’s Dunya News aired on Thursday (20), he said, “We are committed to the SCO charter and this visit should not be seen as a bilateral one but in the context of the SCO.”
On Thursday, Pakistan’s foreign ministry also said that Bhutto-Zardari will lead his country’s delegation to the SCO meeting in Goa scheduled for May 4 and 5.
Pakistan foreign office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch during a weekly presser on Thursday said that Bhutto-Zardari is attending the SCO meeting at the invitation of his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
“Our participation at the meeting reflects Pakistan’s continued commitment to the SCO charter and process and the importance that Pakistan accords to the region in its foreign policy priorities,” the spokesperson said.
Bhutto-Zardari will also be the first Pakistani foreign minister to visit India after 12 years. The last was Hina Rabbani Khar who went there in 2011 when Manmohan Singh was the country’s prime minister.
India’s external affairs ministry also said on Thursday that it will not be right to focus on a particular member and said India, as the host, has been inviting all member states of the SCO for the events that are underway.
India is currently holding the rotating presidency of the SCO.
MEA spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said similar invitations have also been extended to all SCO member states and that ‘It would not be really appropriate to look at participation by any one particular country’.
He also added that it would be premature to point at any bilateral meeting between the two countries. However, Bagchi added that Jaishankar tries to hold as many bilateral meetings as he can on the margins of such multilateral meetings as it was seen at the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting recently.
Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov will also likely take part in the meeting in Goa.
The SCO includes nine full-fledged members in China, Russia, Iran and the four Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan besides India and Pakistan.
While India and Pakistan joined the SCO in 2017, Iran is the latest member to join the bloc this year.
(With ANI inputs)
