New Delhi — External affairs minister S Jaishankar will be visiting Pakistan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting scheduled to take place on October 16 and 17.

“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 Council of Heads of Government (CHG) in-person meeting, but given the strained bilateral relations between both nations, Jaishankar will be participating in the meeting.

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.

PM Modi has been a regular at the heads of state summit, although he skipped the same in Kazakhstan this year apparently because it clashed with the Parliament session in early July.

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 attacks that followed.

While Indian delegations have travelled to Pakistan for participation in SCO exercises and vice versa, Pakistan’s then foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari visited India last year for a meeting of SCO foreign ministers. This cooperation has been made possible by the SCO Charter that doesn’t allow member-states to raise bilateral issues.

*What is SCO?*

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.

Known as the “alliance of the East”, the SCO is the largest regional organisation in the world in terms of geographical coverage and population, covering three-fifths of the Eurasian continent and nearly half of the human population.

SCO represents around 42 per cent of the world’s population and 20 per cent of the global GDP. The SCO is seen as a counter-balance to Nato, limiting the influence of 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. India’s membership was pushed by Russia which was aiming to counter China’s growing influence in the region. However, with changes in the geopolitical realities since 2014, India aims to stay involved in the SCO to balance the growing closeness between Russia and China even as India has got closer to the US. —

Reader correspondent