External affairs minister S Jaishankar will be visiting Pakistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting scheduled to take place on October 15 and 16.
“The external affairs minister will lead our delegation to Pakistan to participate in the SCO summit which will be held in Islamabad on 15 and 16 October,” said Randhir Jaiswal, external affairs ministry spokesperson.
Pakistan had invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the SCO CounSCO is one of the few multilateral forums where India and Pakistan have managed to work together, despite the hostilities that have plagued the relationship since their abortive attempt to relaunch the dialogue process in 2015 and the terror attacks that followed. Council of Heads of Government (CHG) in-person meeting, which Jaishankar will be attending, The TOI reported.
Pakistan will be hosting the SCO meeting as it holds the rotating chairmanship of the CHG, the second highest decision-making body in the Eurasian group after the Council of Heads of State.
SCO is one of the few multilateral forums, where India and Pakistan have managed to work together, despite the hostilities that have plagued the relationship since their abortive attempt to relaunch the dialogue process in 2015 and the terror attack that followed.
The SCO is a Eurasian permanent intergovernmental international organisation created in June 2001 by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India and China. The SCO was preceded by the Shanghai Five mechanism
According to the reports by India Today, SCO represents around 42 per cent of the world’s population and 20 percent of the global GDP. The SCO is seen as a counter-balance to Nato, limiting the influence of the United States of America (USA) in Central Asia.
India was an observer state at the SCO since 2005 and was admitted as a full member of the SCO in 2017.
