Pak’s Bilawal Bhutto to attend SCO meet in Goa; no word on bilateral meetings

Pakistan said on Thursday foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will attend a meeting of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) foreign ministers in Goa next month, setting the stage for the first visit by a senior Pakistani leader to India in nearly a decade.

The move is in line with Islamabad’s decision not to skip any important meetings under the framework of SCO, whose current chair is India. The announcement by Pakistan’s Foreign Office followed months of intense speculation on whether Bilawal or minister of state for foreign affairs Hina Rabbani Khar would attend the meeting in Goa during May 4-5.

There was, however, no official word from both countries on whether Bilawal’s visit would lead to a bilateral meeting with external affairs minister S Jaishankar.

The last senior Pakistani leader to visit India was former premier Nawaz Sharif, who travelled to New Delhi to attend Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inauguration on May 26, 2014. Modi subsequently made a surprise stopover in Lahore in December 2015 to meet Sharif while on his way back to New Delhi from Kabul.

In a related development, people familiar with the matter said Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif will virtually join a SCO defence ministers to be hosted by India during April 27-29. Asif’s decision not to attend the meeting in-person was believed to have been influenced by several factors, including the fragile political situation in Pakistan.

“Foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will be leading the Pakistan delegation to the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) being held on May 4-5, 2023, in Goa, India,” Foreign Office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch told a weekly media briefing in Islamabad.

Bilawal is attending the meet at the invitation of Jaishankar, the current chair of the CFM. “Our participation in the meeting reflects Pakistan’s commitment to the SCO charter and processes, and the importance that Pakistan accords to the region in its foreign policy priorities,” Baloch said.

External affairs ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi was circumspect when asked at a weekly briefing whether Bilawal’s visit will set the stage for a bilateral meeting with Jaishankar. Bagchi said the visit by Pakistan’s foreign minister should be seen in the context of India’s invitation to all SCO member states to attend meetings being hosted in the country.

“For the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting…in Goa…we had extended similar invitations to all SCO member states and we look forward to a successful meeting. It would not really be appropriate to focus on participation by any one particular country,” Bagchi said.

“Regarding requests for bilateral meetings, I think it’s premature…Usually, the external affairs minister does try to hold as many bilateral meetings as he can on the margins of such multilateral meetings. Till such time as they are locked in, I don’t think it would be correct for me to comment on that,” he added.

On the Indian side, Bilawal’s visit will be closely watched to see whether he uses the trip to raise contentious issues such as Kashmir, people familiar with the matter said. Bilawal has used recent public appearances at multilateral forums such as the United Nations to criticise India’s policies on Kashmir and other matters.

However, Bilawal told a media conference that he would be going to India to attend a multilateral forum and wouldn’t raise any bilateral issues there.

India’s invitations for the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting were sent out in January, days after Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif offered conditional talks with India on all outstanding issues, including Kashmir. However, Sharif later clarified talks couldn’t be held until India reversed its decision of August 5, 2019 to scrap the special status of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan and India have not held any substantive talks since the 2008 Mumbai attacks carried out by Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Efforts to revive dialogue following PM Modi’s visit to Lahore were hit by terror attacks at Uri and Pathankot in 2016. The suicide attack at Pulwama that killed 40 Indian troops in February 2019 and the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in August the same year took bilateral ties to a further low.

Hina Rabbani Khar was the last Pakistani foreign minister to visit India in 2011. Pakistan’s Foreign Office said the country’s participation in SCO meetings reflected its commitment to the eight-member grouping. Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman participated in the online meeting of SCO ministers for environmental protection on April 18, while a senior official virtually joined the meeting of SCO heads of agencies for preventing emergency situations on Thursday.