New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar is unlikely to have a formal bilateral meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s foreign ministers’ meeting in Goa on 4-5 May, it is learnt.
Sources told ThePrint that the two are unlikely to take part in “structured” bilateral talks, but did not rule out “brief talks” on the sidelines of the summit, given that several foreign ministers will be under one roof.
The sources further said that Pakistan did not request India — the current Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) chair — for formal bilateral talks.
Just days before Bilawal’s visit, the Pakistan military appeared to up the ante, with its spokesperson holding a special briefing Tuesday saying that Kashmir never was, nor will ever be “an integral part of India”, according to media reports.
Last week, when asked whether the Pakistan side had requested for a bilateral meeting between Jaishankar and Bilawal, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Arindam Bagchi did not give a direct answer. “We look forward to a successful meeting. It will not be appropriate to focus on participation by any one particular country,” he had said.
Bilawal’s visit will be the first by a high-level Pakistani official to India in nearly a decade. The last such visit was in May 2014, when then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif attended Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oath-taking ceremony in New Delhi.
India got the SCO chairmanship last year at the Samarkand summit in Uzbekistan, and is hosting key ministerial meetings in the run-up to the SCO summit in July.
Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif will be attending the SCO Defence Ministers’ meeting on 28 April in New Delhi, but in a virtual format.
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Upping ante ahead of SCO meet
In the run up to the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting, Pakistan appeared to up the ante. Meanwhile, Jaishankar — during a press briefing in Panama — said Monday that it is “very difficult” for India to engage with a neighbour that practices cross-border terrorism.
This came days after five Indian soldiers were killed in a terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district last week. Sources had told ThePrint that the attack was carried out by a combined team of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) with a mix of local and Pakistani terrorists.
During a press conference Tuesday, Major General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) — the media and PR wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces — asserted that Kashmir “has never been an integral part of India, nor will it ever be”.
He also commented on the recent claims by former J&K governor Satya Pal Malik over the 2019 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 Central Police Reserve Force (CRPF) personnel were killed.
“India had a properly planned effort in February 2019 in Pulwama, as verified by their own governor Satyapal Malik and ex-army chief,” said ISPR DG.
According to media reports, both Malik and former army chief General Shankar Roychowdhury recently raised questions over intelligence failure in the Pulwama attack. In an interview to a news channel, Malik had alleged that the central government had denied aircraft for the movement of security personnel — a charge that the government has denied.
Since the Indian government abrogated Article 370 of the Constitution and revoked special status of J&K in 2019, New Delhi and Islamabad have downgraded diplomatic ties and expelled each another’s high commissioners.
(Edited by Anumeha Saxena)
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