Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is expected to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Foreign Minister meeting in Goa on May 4 and 5. Chinese Foreign minister Qin Gang and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov will also be participating in the meeting.
Minister of External affairs S Jaishankar will hold separate bilateral talks with Gang and Lavrov, but according to PIT there are no plans for a bilateral meeting between him and Bhutto-Zardari.
Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari's visit to India comes days after the Poonch attack on April 20 that claimed the lives of five Indian army soldiers. Unidentified terrorists fired upon an army vehicle that was passing the Bhimber Gali and Poonch areas in Rajouri sector through grenades.
Bhutto-Zardari's trip to India will be the first visit from Islamabad since 2011. The then Pakistan foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar had visited India that year. Khar is currently serving as the minister of state for foreign affairs.
SCO Foreign Minister meeting
The two-day SCO foreign ministerial meeting will begin with a gala reception at a luxury beach resort in Goa on Thursday while the main deliberations will take place on Friday. The meeting is taking place ahead of the annual summit of the grouping in the first week of July and amid a rapidly evolving regional security situation.
Jaishankar is also likely to hold separate bilateral talks with his counterparts from some other SCO countries on Friday.
India is hosting the SCO in its capacity as the grouping's chair. The people said the foreign ministers will deliberate on overall challenges facing the region in the backdrop of the current geo-political turmoil and the state of bilateral ties between the member nations would not impact the discussions.
Bilateral talks with Chinese Foreign minister Qin Gang
The bilateral meeting between Jaishankar and Qin will be the second one in the last two months. The Chinese foreign minister visited India in March to attend a meeting of the G20 foreign ministers. In the talks with Qin, Jaishankar is once again expected to convey that India-China ties cannot be normal unless there is peace in the border areas, reported PTI.
India-China ties have nosedived after the clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020. India since then has maintained its position that the relation between the two countries will be based on mutual respect, mutual sensitivity and mutual interests.
Bilateral talks Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov
The people cited above said Jaishankar and Russian foreign minister Lavrov in their meeting are set to review the overall bilateral ties with a focus on trade and commercial engagement. The talks between Jaishankar and Lavrov are also set to cover a number of issues relating to bilateral ties and regional situations, they said. It is expected that challenges of terrorism as well as dealing with implications of the war in Ukraine will also be discussed.
SCO
The SCO is an influential economic and security bloc and has emerged as one of the largest transregional international organisations. It was founded at a summit in Shanghai in 2001 by the presidents of Russia, China, the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan became its permanent members in 2017.
India was made an observer at the SCO in 2005 and has generally participated in the ministerial-level meetings of the grouping, which focus mainly on security and economic cooperation in the Eurasian region. India has shown a keen interest in deepening its security-related cooperation with the SCO and its Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS), which specifically deals with issues relating to security and defence.
