New Delhi: Minister of Foreign Affairs Sujashankar will visit Pakistan Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) meeting is scheduled to be held from October 16th to 17th.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said: “The Foreign Minister will lead our delegation to Pakistan to participate in the SCO Summit to be held in Islamabad from October 15 to 16.”
Pakistan had invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to attend a face-to-face meeting of the SCO Heads of Government Council (CHG), but in view of the tense situation bilateral relations Between the two countries, Jaishankar will participate in this meeting.
Pakistan will host the SCO meeting as it holds the rotating chairmanship of the CHG, the second-highest decision-making body in the Eurasian grouping after the Council of Heads of State.
Prime Minister Modi has been a frequent attendee at heads of state summits, although he Kazakhstan This year it was apparently because it clashed with a parliamentary session in early July.
The SCO is one of the few multilateral forums where India and Pakistan have successfully cooperated, although hostilities have plagued relations since the two countries’ failed attempts to restart the dialogue process in 2015 and subsequent terrorist attacks.
While an Indian delegation had traveled to Pakistan to participate in SCO exercises and vice versa, then Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari visited India last year to attend the SCO Foreign Ministers’ Meeting. This cooperation is achieved through the SCO Charter, which does not allow member states to raise bilateral issues.
What is the SCO?
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a permanent intergovernmental international organization in Eurasia founded in June 2001 by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and China. The predecessor of the SCO was the Shanghai Five-Country Mechanism.
Known as the “Eastern Alliance”, the SCO is the regional organization with the largest geographical coverage and population in the world, covering three-fifths of the Eurasian continent and nearly half of the population.
The SCO population accounts for approximately 42% of the world’s population and approximately 20% of the world’s GDP. The SCO is seen as a counterweight to NATO and limits U.S. influence in Central Asia.
India has been an observer state of the SCO since 2005 and was admitted as a full member of the SCO in 2017. However, as geopolitical realities have changed since 2014, India intends to continue participating in the SCO while moving closer to the United States to balance the increasingly close relations between Russia and China.
On the revival of SAARC
Responding to the possibility of revival of SAARC, which has been on hold since 2017, Jaiswal said the government “has given impetus to Bimstec on SAARC”.
“We attach great importance to regional cooperation and regional connectivity. Therefore, we promoted BIMSTEC in SAARC. We want to strengthen regional cooperation, but everyone knows why this form of special cooperation (SAARC) is not recognized.” A’ Certain countries’ have a particular way of doing things, which has hindered the development of SAARC,” he said.
