Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar landed in Pakistan on Tuesday for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, the first top diplomat from Delhi to visit the country’s arch-rival neighbour in nearly a decade.
Jaishankar and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif greeted each other with a handshake and sombre expressions at the start of an official dinner for the visiting leaders of the bloc.
Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan are bitter adversaries with longstanding political tensions, having fought three wars and numerous smaller skirmishes since they were carved out of the subcontinent’s partition in 1947.
The Himalayan region of Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan but claimed by both in full, with each accusing the other of stoking militancy there.
Relations have been particularly sour since 2019, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the limited autonomy of Indian-administered Kashmir.
Modi’s 2019 move was celebrated across India but led Pakistan to suspend bilateral trade and downgrade diplomatic ties with New Delhi.
Jaishankar arrived at an airbase near the capital Islamabad, where he was met by a low-level delegation, unlike other leaders who were welcomed by senior ministers.
The neighbouring governments have said that no bilateral meetings have been requested, and Jaishankar’s visit will strictly follow the SCO schedule.
City lockdown
Islamabad is keen to project an image of stability and security while hosting the meeting of governments, after a rash of civic unrest in the capital and militant attacks elsewhere across Pakistan in recent weeks.
The country’s popular opposition leader and former prime minister Imran Khan remains in jail on charges he says are designed to keep him from returning to power.
The city has been shut down for the two-day summit with more than 9,000 police officers deployed alongside security forces.
Roads have been blocked off, restaurants closed and public holidays announced in an attempt to restrict movement in the capital and the neighbouring city of Rawalpindi.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk, whose nations established the SCO, are also in town for the meeting between the bloc of 10 nations, which includes Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Sixteen more countries are affiliated as observers or “dialogue partners”.
China and Russia have used the alliance to deepen their ties with Central Asian states and vie for influence in the region. They have recently pitched the organisation as a competitor to the West.
The bloc claims to represent 40 percent of the world’s population and about 30 percent of its GDP, but its members have diverse political systems and even open disagreements with one another.
Former Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj visited Pakistan in 2015, arriving for a summit on Afghanistan, while Modi also made a surprise visit to Pakistan that year, shortly after taking office for his first term, sparking short-lived hopes of a thaw in relations.
Pakistan’s former foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was in Goa last year — also a rare visit — for an SCO meeting, where he and Jaishankar were involved in a verbal spat.
It was the first official visit by a senior Pakistani official to their eastern neighbour since 2016, but the two foreign ministers did not hold a one-on-one meeting.