India To Invite Pakistan PM Shehbaaz Sharif To SCO Meet in Goa

New Delhi: Pakistani Prime Minister will be invited by India to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conference in May of this year. This occurs a day after invitations to the SCO conference in Goa were given to Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto.

The invites were delivered in accordance with the established procedure, however, it is unknown whether Bilawal Bhutto and Qin Gang will attend.

It will be the first such trip from Islamabad to India since 2011. If the Pakistani prime minister or foreign minister choose to attend the meeting in person. In that year, India was visited by Pakistan’s then-foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar.

Relations between India and Pakistan became very strained after India’s warplanes attacked a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist training camp in Pakistan’s Balakot in response to the Pulwama terror attack in February 2019.

Relations between the two countries further deteriorated when India stated in August 2019 that it will revoke Jammu and Kashmir’s special powers and split the former state into Union territories.

India is the eight-nation SCO’s current chair. Later this year, the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting is anticipated to take place in Goa.

The summit and important ministerial meetings will be held in Goa during the first week of May. India now holds the chairmanship of the nine-member organisation, which it assumed last September. China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are also members of the SCO. Along with the other Central Asian nations, invitations have also been addressed to the foreign ministries of Russia and China.