Chicago – October 04, 2024
India’s External Affairs Minister, S Jaishankar, will head to Pakistan to attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s (SCO) Council of Heads of Government on October 15-16. The Ministry of External Affairs announced this on Friday. This important meeting will take place in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Earlier in August, Pakistan, which currently holds the rotating chairmanship of the SCO, invited all heads of government from the SCO member countries to this meeting. They even invited India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
This trip by Jaishankar marks the first visit to Pakistan by an Indian External Affairs Minister in nine years. The last visit was by Sushma Swaraj, who went to Islamabad for a conference about Afghanistan in December 2015. Also, in May 2023, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister at the time, visited India for an SCO meeting in Goa. It was the first visit by a Pakistani Foreign Minister to India in nearly 12 years.
