EAM Dr S Jaishankar and Bilawal Bhtto-Zardari with other froegn ministers of SCO countries
New Delhi
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari shared a table as they got together with the foreign ministers of other Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Uzbekistan's capital Tashkent on Friday.
It’s not clear if Jaishankar and the young Pakistani minister will have a bilateral meeting. The SCO foreign minister’s meeting will prepare the ground for the two-day SCO summit to be held on September 15 and 16.
After India downsized its relations with its western neighbour after the Pulwama attack and Pakistan ended all the trade relations after the Indian Parliament revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, the relations between the two have remained tense.
After the formation of the new government in Pakistan under the leadership of Shehbaz Sharif, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan are sitting together for the first time.
S Jaishankar said he met the deouty prime Minister and foreign minister of Kazakastan Mukhtar Tileuberdi.
After becoming a minister Bilawal Bhutto advocated the restoration of friendly relations with India.
He said that connecting with New Delhi is in the interest of the country.
However, India has been saying that terrorism and talks cannot go together. On the other hand, there is also the fact that the ceasefire agreement between Indo-Pak last year at the army level is giving good results so far. There has been a significant reduction in the number of ceasefire violations.
Uzbekistan is currently the president of the two-decade-old organization SCO. This organization includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and four other Central Asian countries - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – as members.
The next summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is going to be held in India next year.
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