Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar is scheduled to visit Pakistan this month to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, as announced by the spokesperson for the Indian foreign ministry on Friday. This visit marks the first occasion in nearly ten years that an Indian foreign minister has traveled to Pakistan, occurring amidst ongoing tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations, primarily due to the Kashmir conflict. According to Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, Jaishankar will head the Indian delegation at the summit of Eurasian leaders on October 15 and 16; however, it remains unclear whether he will engage in discussions with any Pakistani officials during the event. The two South Asian countries have a history of three wars, two of which were fought over the contested Kashmir region in the Himalayas. India has accused Pakistan of supporting Islamist militants who oppose Indian governance in the area, a claim that Pakistan has consistently refuted.
Earlier this year, Jaishankar expressed India’s desire to address the longstanding issue of cross-border terrorism, emphasizing that such efforts cannot align with the principles of a good neighbor. The relationship between the two nations has experienced intermittent periods of improvement; however, it has predominantly remained strained since 2019, when both countries downgraded their diplomatic relations in response to India’s revocation of Kashmir’s special status and its reorganization into two federally governed territories. Tensions escalated earlier that same year following a suicide attack on an Indian military convoy in Kashmir, which was linked to militants based in Pakistan, leading India to conduct an airstrike on what it identified as a militant facility within Pakistan. The most recent high-level interaction occurred in May 2023, when Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, then Pakistan’s foreign minister, participated in the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting in Goa, India. Although Bhutto-Zardari did not engage with any Indian officials, he and Jaishankar utilized the occasion to exchange accusations regarding their strained relations.