India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, is to attend a multi-lateral meeting in Pakistan in what will be the first visit by a high-ranking Indian official to Pakistan since 2015.
Jaishankar will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a regional body, in Pakistan.
Last year Pakistan’s foreign minister, Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, had attended a meeting of the organisation in India. This made him the first senior official from that country to visit India since 2011.
Relations between India and Pakistan have been tense since their partition in 1947. In recent years they have been even more fraught than usual, and in 2019 Indian forces attacked Pakistani territory, after militants attacked Indian troops in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
It is not clear whether Jaishankar’s visit is evidence of a thawing in relations. When Bhutto-Zardari visited India, he said that the focus would be on the SCO only and that the onus rested on India to start peace talks.
[Image: Syed Wasiq Shah from Pixabay]