File photo of Pakistan Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Neither India nor Pakistan has requested a bilateral meeting when External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar lands in Islamabad for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Heads of Government meet on October 15-16, said Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar. 

He said that the government plans to welcome Mr. Jaishankar with “full protocol”, as is Pakistan’s duty as a “good host”, comments that follow Mr. Jaishankar’s remark last week that he would attend the meeting as a “good member of the SCO”. 

While Mr. Jaishankar and other leaders of the 10-member SCO, including Iranian Vice-President Mohammadreza Aref and Prime Ministers from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, are expected to land on Tuesday in Islamabad, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Chinese Premier Li Qiang will arrive a day early on Monday for bilateral meetings with the Pakistani leadership.

While the MEA did not confirm which of the leaders Mr. Jaishankar would hold bilateral talks with during the visit, all eyes will be on any meeting with the Chinese leader, ahead of the BRICS summit in Russia on October 22-24, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping will come face-to-face, with speculation that they would meet to try and resolve the military standoff at the Line of Actual Control. 

With neither side holding out much hope for an India-Pakistan meeting in Islamabad, experts have been playing down the impact of Mr. Jaishankar’s visit, the first by an Indian Foreign Minister in nearly a decade, on bilateral ties. In 2015, former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had travelled to Pakistan for a Heart of Asia conference, but the visit had also seen a bilateral meeting and an announcement of the revival of the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue, which ran aground a month later after the Pathankot terror attacks.

“India’s Foreign Minister has not asked for any meeting, and we haven’t requested a bilateral meeting either. He will come as a guest for the SCO, and discussions will be held on multilateral issues,” Mr. Dar told the media, briefing the press about arrangements for the SCO meeting, which he said was the first such major multilateral event in Pakistan in nearly three decades. 

In March this year, Mr. Dar had said that Pakistan would “seriously examine” whether to restart trade ties with India, which have been suspended since 2019, but the move did make any headway. When asked by journalists on Sunday, whether the issue could be raised during or on the side-lines of the SCO meeting, Mr. Dar said that while Pakistan is discussing initiatives like the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Pakistan-Afghanistan-India) energy pipeline and others with some SCO members separately, these were not part of the SCO’s discussions.

“In a broader context, we speak about connectivity and road and rail linkages with many members of the SCO bilaterally. But the mandate of the SCO will be multilateral, and the agenda is fixed,” he said.

The Pakistan government has been worried about security arrangements particularly as the Opposition, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf Party (PTI), whose leader former Prime Minister Imran Khan remains in prison, has announced a major protest in the capital city on October 15, unless the government allows Mr. Khan to meet with supporters and lawyers.

Thousands of PTI supporters had flooded Islamabad’s D-chowk last week in protest to free Mr. Khan, who has been charged in a number of cases, and clashed with police there, fuelling fears of a repeat. Ahead of the SCO, Pakistani security officials said more than 9,000 police personnel were on duty, and protests have been banned in Islamabad, Karachi and other cities. 

In an unexpected broadside, a senior Pakistani Minister appeared to blame India for the protests by the PTI.

“Pakistan’s neighbour can’t digest the fact that we are going to be hosting SCO Summit so they in connivance with PTI have caused disruptions,” said Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan’s Minister for Planning Development & Special Initiatives on Saturday, although he did not directly name India.

The MEA did not issue any response to the statement.